When the name Frida Gustavsson popped up in my inbox, I was immediately transported back to my early editor days at Who What Wear when I reported on backstage style during fashion week. At the time, Gustavsson was a fixture on the runways, opening and closing shows for some of the biggest fashion houses, and was a staple in major campaigns and magazine editorials. Having written about Gustavsson for so long as a model, it feels almost serendipitous to be covering her again, nearly 10 years later, as the breakout star of a major Netflix series.
It’s the day before the big premiere of her new show, Vikings: Valhalla, and Gustavsson and I are meeting for the first time over Zoom. The actress is back in her native Sweden following a whirlwind press trip to Los Angeles, which included a shoot for this story. She is clad in a beautiful suit jacket and white blouse for the virtual occasion, her wavy hair pulled back into an effortless ponytail. Talking about this next phase of her career, she is clearly in her element.
It makes sense, seeing as Gustavsson has been working toward this moment for the better half of her life. She knew leaving her successful modeling career behind to pursue acting would come with some criticism and a few eye rolls, but she was determined to make it work. So she left New York, moved back home, and immediately enrolled in drama school. “It came to a point where I was like, ‘I just can’t pretend anymore,’” she says of making the pivot. “It felt like there was something inside me that had to come out, and I thought, ‘Why not try it?’” Having spent so much time in front of a camera and knowing how to use her physical body to tell a story, Gustavsson was a natural performer. It wasn’t long before she started steadily booking projects in Europe, including the romantic drama Swoon and the series Dröm and De utvalda.
But when Gustavsson heard that a Viking show was in development at Netflix, she immediately called her agent. “There must be some badass woman in there somewhere,” she tells me she said to her team. They sent over the script, and she quickly became enamored with the show’s female lead, Freydís Eiríksdóttir. “I guess there must be a 1000-year-old spirit of a Viking woman living inside me that just wanted to come out,” she laughs. “It’s such a human story, and I feel like [Freydís] is so complex, and she has such a richness to her emotional life that I was like, ‘Yes, I would love to be a part of this.’”
Gustavsson put her audition on tape, sent it out into the universe, and waited… and waited. “You don’t hear anything for a while,” she says. “You try your best not to think about it every single day when you open your email. And then one day, I opened it, and in all caps, it said, ‘They love you.’”
The actress quickly got to work building Freydís into the dynamic character we see on-screen. Vikings: Valhalla picks up 100 years after Michael Hirst’s popular History Channel series Vikings when tensions between the Vikings and England reached an all-time high and internal conflict over pagan and Christian beliefs threatened to dismantle the Vikings. At the center of the story is the famous Viking explorer Leif Erikson and his sister Freydís, who arrive from Greenland to join the Viking army against England. When we first meet Freydís, she has retribution plans of her own: to find and kill the Christian Viking who raped her when she was young.
There is little written about Freydís in historical texts, and what does exist paints the Viking warrior in a brutal light. So it was up to Gustavsson and the show’s creator, Jeb Stuart, to figure out what could have informed her ruthless nature. “She’s not a very sympathetic character,” Gustavsson tells me. “She’s strong-willed, and she’s fierce, but she also murders children, so we decided quite quickly that that’s not the Freydís we want to portray. Me and Jeb started speaking [and asking], How does it influence you growing up in a tiny society at the edge of the world? How does it influence you having such a violent father and having a complex relationship with your brother who you are extremely close with, but you are also very different? Of course, for me, something that informed me a lot about both her emotional life and physical life is that she’s a survivor of this horrific rape. That emotional trauma and the physical trauma was a way for me to approach her and to understand her.”
What Vikings: Valhalla and its predecessor Vikings do so well in their storytelling is put powerful women at the forefront, which made joining the project all that more appealing to Gustavsson. “I think it’s quite rare in an action-packed show like this or a film that you get to have space for multiple women, especially multiple women who are not antagonistic,” she says. “We don’t have a good queen and an evil queen, which is an easy trope that Hollywood often falls into. And it was so refreshing to see these incredibly powerful women working together, lifting each other up, inspiring one another, fighting together.” There’s a particularly noteworthy scene in episode six where this kind of sisterhood and camaraderie is well on display.
As I write this piece, the series is number one on Netflix. It’s not surprising considering the Viking-era renaissance taking place in the entertainment industry. Not only was Vikings a huge hit for the History Channel during its six-season run, but Assassin’s Creed Valhalla also became the highest-grossing video game in the franchise’s history. Next month, we will see Alexander Skarsgård step into the role of Viking prince Amleth in the epic historical film The Northman. The fact that audiences have an ongoing fascination with the Scandinavian warriors is not lost on Gustavsson either. “I’ve asked myself this many times: Why do we still find these people so intimately interesting?” she says. “I guess it’s because it’s a historical breaking point where we are still close enough that there’s almost actual history. There’s almost written text. But we’re still so far away that it’s clad in mystery. … And to at that point in history get into a tiny ship and look at the horizon and say ‘I want to know what’s on that other side,’ that’s incredibly fascinating.”
Now that the show is officially out, Gustavsson can’t help but revel in the moment. There was a surreal point during her trip to Los Angeles when she and co-stars Sam Corlett and Leo Suter came across a Vikings: Valhalla billboard on Sunset Boulevard. After two years of working on the series, it was finally here. “I’m still tearing up thinking about it,” she says of that day. “I don’t want to sound self-absorbed or anything, but for me growing up, I would never have imagined that this would happen to me. Of course, I dreamt about it like many other kids … but to see [the billboard] just felt like such a full-circle moment for me in many ways. I’m so humbled and thankful I got to be on this part.”
With a hit global series now under her belt, Gustavsson has her sights set on what’s next with one-year, three-year, and five-year plans that hopefully include continuing the journey of Freydís. (I’m keeping my fingers crossed for a second season!) “I’m searching for other interesting characters that make my fingers itch,” she says. There’s one thing we’ve always known about Gustavsson: Put her in front of a camera, and she will shine.
Vikings: Valhalla is now streaming on Netflix.
Team Credits:
Photographer: David Higgs
Stylist: Lauren Eggertsen
Hair: Kylee Heath
Makeup: Emily Cheng
Location: L’Ermitage Beverly Hills