Royalteen: Meet the stars of Netflix's new Norwegian sensation
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Loading... - william harrison
- 15 Aug 2022
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“It’s the classic Cinderella story, right? Although I don’t think you’ve ever seen it quite like this…” says Elli Rhiannon Müller Osborne. She’s one of the stars of Norway’s hottest new Netflix film, Royalteen. Based on the hugely successful YA book series by Randi Fuglehaug and Anne Gunn Halvorsen, it’s your quintessential high-school romance: boy meets girl, girl meets boy’s family... who happen to be the King and Queen of Norway.
The film arrives hot on the heels of the hit Swedish show Young Royals, capitalising on a surge of interest in Scandinavian monarchy. “I don’t know why we are all suddenly so into them,” laughs Filip Bargee Ramberg, another of Royalteen’s stars, and the young singer-songwriter behind the film’s central song. “I guess we grew up with tales of princes and princesses and there’s this mystery around them now – we want to know more about what they’re really like.”
The film takes this curiosity as a jumping off point, placing a decidedly Gen-Z filter on (fictional) royal life, with more emphasis on teen than royal. Müller Osborne, last seen as the lead in Ida Takes Charge, plays the deliciously snide and superior Princess Margrethe (“It was so much fun to be the bad guy,” she beams) furious that her twin brother, Crown Prince Kalle, has taken an interest in mysterious new student Lena. In many ways, she has taken on an old-trope – the evil stepmother, the wicked queen – and brought it into the Gen-Z age. Indeed, the film’s director Per Olav Sørenssen describes the film as Gossip Girl meets The Crown.
It’s a fitting description for a narrative dominated by online gossip and the pernicious nature of social media, whether you’re a royal or just a normal teenager. “It’s something that connects the two central characters,” says Ines Høysæter Asserson, who plays Lena and cements her status as one of Norway’s biggest rising stars after roles in Skam and Harajuku. “Royals have to keep their record completely clean as everything has such a high stake, but that’s what it’s like to be a teenager on social media too."
