Frida Gustavsson was one of the top models in the world when she sashayed away from the runway to pursue acting. Now starring in the hit Netflix show, Vikings: Valhalla, Frida is not only slaying vikings for a living, she has also slayed her insecurities and doubters, too as Josh Smith finds out for our latest column, Josh Smith Meets…
WARNING: Contains Vikings: Valhalla season two plot spoilers
It’s just ten days into 2023 when Frida Gustavsson joins me over Zoom, from her home in a very snowy Stockholm, but it’s already shaping up to be quite the year for the 29 year-old.
“I recently got married and I just came back from my honeymoon, which was fantastic! It was my first holiday in over three years,” she beams. Frida’s joy is infectious and at a time of great personal happiness she is reaching new heights professionally too, playing the historical larger-than-life vengeance seeking warrior, Freydis Eriksdotter in the hit Netflix show, Vikings: Valhalla, which after a first season that notched up over 80 million plus watch hours, is back for season two.
Why is Vikings: Valhalla so appealing? It lives on the edge of historical fact and fables with very real human anguish, too. If you are new to the show and you think life is touch savage in 2023, spare a thought for the Vikings, there was no ‘easy day’ in that savage world. It’s a world of the bloodiest battles, ruthless rulers, religious discrimination between Christians and Pagans and amongst it all Frida’s Freydis has plans for retribution: to find and kill the Christian Viking who raped and scarred her. And after finally getting her revenge in season one, Freydis returns to battle whilst pregnant. How’s that for badass?! But don’t worry it’s not all heavy, there are a number of long haired hunks with top knots (if that is your bag) including her onscreen brother, Leif (Sam Corlett) and her baby daddy, Harald (Leo Suter).
“Filming season two is probably the hardest thing I've done in my career,” Frida admits and this is an actress who doesn’t do anything by halves, she even does ALL of her own stunts. “The stakes are even higher, she is no longer just fighting for herself and she's slowly taking on the mantle as the leader of the last Pagans. She's representing a lot to these people who go through this huge struggle. She's also pregnant and losing that one thing that she always has, her physicality, so she's in a very vulnerable position. She's parted ways with her lover and brother. All of her friends are dead. Coming into season two, I was like, ‘okay, this is gonna be a very heavy season and every day you go to work you're like, ‘today is the today where I'm giving birth alone in this little cave,’ or ‘today, my baby gets kidnapped, or, today my friend is getting killed.’ It's a very heavy show to work on.”
Personally I am a big fan of screaming into a pillow when things get a little tough, but all this sword fighting and screaming in battle must provide a little release whilst contending with this intense material? “Yes,” Frida replies, “a couple of years ago I got burnt out and something that my therapist said was, ‘this is gonna sound strange but just go into the forest, scream, take sticks and just hit trees.’ It's the best way to release anger because if you are a people pleaser like I am, it's a really good way to get out all this built up anger.” If you are a certified people pleaser like me, take notes for future reference!
“Freydis was also such a catalyst for me,” she continues. “I can use her to let go of so many things. I love that she can be big, she can be loud and it's really liberating as a woman. You're so seldom given the opportunity to be that loud, just scream and to not think about the way you look while doing it. Freydis has been a huge liberation for me.”
How has Freydis liberated her? “I think especially with my physicality, I'm six foot one, which is very tall and even being Swedish - we're one of the tallest people in the world - it's still something that I've always been really insecure about,” Frida shares. “Then when I was a teenager and in my early twenties I modelled and found a world where that was celebrated but I still always felt really insecure about it. With Freydis, she demanded somebody who can be tall, who can be athletic, who can carry heavy equipment and she can fight with these big men. She really made me feel so much more secure in my body. It was really empowering for me as an actor and I’m proud of owning that space.”
On that subject of physicality, it must have been quite the journey to go from feeling self-conscious to being scouted in Ikea at 10 years old in her homeland of Sweden, walking runways for every major brand from Dior to Victoria’s Secret in the 2010s, whilst gracing the cover of every major fashion magazine and then pushing her body to its limits as an actress, I ask? “When I started modelling I was 12,” Frida tells me. “I hadn't even hit puberty and whilst I was in the middle of my career I soon realised, ‘in my family we've got ass, we've got legs,’ and that started coming in. I became really self-conscious about the way I looked and for a lot of years I never trained to be strong, I trained to be skinny. And I think that's the truth for a majority of women in the world. We don't train so we can actually carry something, we train so we can be petite and not take up a lot of space. And even in how women sit, it's always to the side, you cross your legs and there's a lot of it that's just to take up less space.”
“With Freydis she's grown up in the outskirts of the Viking world, she doesn't have this limited idea on what a woman should be and how she should look,” she continues. “She's gonna be big, loud and sit however she wants to sit. I worked a lot with a personal trainer to kind of build up a physique that would be believable. I spent a lot of time carrying logs and rocks in the forest and building a back so it would look like I could actually row and to build up arms - all these things that I've spent my entire twenties removing. That was a really interesting journey and I learned a lot from it in terms of how to look at my body and how to look at it as a tool.”
Call us all kinds of intrigued.
All her physical work didn’t prevent Frida from ending up in A&E though. “There was this big fight in episode three of the first season that we rehearsed for all this time,” she laughs. “There's this six foot seven Bulgarian man who I'm strangling with my bracelet and doing this wrestling takedown. We rehearsed it and then I go, ‘can we do it just one more time just for fun so we can shoot it and I can look at it.’ Of course I slid and fell on this little funny bone. I’m like, ‘I'm tough. I'm not gonna cry!’ I was just sitting there shaking.”
“My stunt double said, ‘I think I heard the sound of something breaking! Should we get a trauma blanket?’ We drove to the hospital but it was summer 2020, so it's the height of Covid pandemic. And they're like, ‘I'm so sorry, we're gonna have to just drop you off. Call us when you know something, but no one can come with you!’ So I go into the hospital wearing my full armour with maybe even a knife in my belt. And the people at the emergency room, are looking at me like, ‘who is this insane woman showing up covered in blood and mud, crying, kind of holding it together wearing 11th century leather clothing?’” Now that is a bucket list moment!
Aside from the physically demanding, and at times comical toll, the role took on Frida I wonder how carrying around the trauma of playing a survivor of sexual assault impacted her and how she prepared for it? “Partly relying on personal experiences of trauma, but also reading a lot about trauma survivors,” she responds. “I read a book called Our Bodies: Their Battlefield by a British journalist [Christina Lamb] chronicling women who are survivors of sexual assaults during war and how that takes a toll physicality. What you see is that everybody deals with their traumas differently and I wanted to find certain things that I could work with that could be a trigger point. She's the survivor of this horrific rape where she was bound and so something that I worked with was that being restricted is a trigger for her.”
“It's always really intense when you place really dark and heavy traumatic feelings on certain physical aspects, because it becomes so real,” Frida adds. “Your body doesn't know that you're acting, your brain can comprehend that, but when you go through really exhausting physical things, your body reacts like it's a real trauma. That was something I also wanted to be mindful of so I came up with a little ritual to make my body realise that we're not in that world and that trauma did not belong to me because being beaten, dragged around, fighting and screaming, your body goes through all of these really traumatic experiences, especially after a seven month shoot.”
Aside from the show’s hair and makeup teams figuratively and mentally transporting her to the Viking era, and back again, a tip from her intimacy co-ordinator helped, too. “We came up with a little ritual of hugging myself, saying certain things and doing a little tap either before or after you do an intimate scene. I implemented that into the other really physically traumatic scenes, especially when Freydis gives birth, her baby is kidnapped and she’s left to bleed out and die. That was a very hard day and it was really nice to have a physical ritual that just reminds you that's not who you are.”
Bringing that trauma to screen is beyond powerful, as is Freydis’ inability to adhere to any stereotype of what you may expect from a female character. And even though they lived over a thousand years ago, Viking women were game changers ahead of their time, which is something Frida is proud to bring to our screens. “Research and history shows that Viking women had a lot of liberties: they could be rulers, they could own property, they could marry, they could get divorced, they could bring people to court. I really wanted to honour that strong female,” she says. “In a way Christianity came and put women on the back burner by saying, ‘you have the man and then you have the woman and it was important to me to show that there's been other ways of portraying women throughout history.”
I wonder if Frida herself has had to battle against stereotypes? “Coming into this industry, especially in Europe, people love going, ‘you're a model and you can always read for the beautiful girlfriend or like the younger sister.’ I felt a lot of people didn't really have faith in me as a performer,” she admits. “I had to fight really hard to get a character like Freydis. I'm so incredibly thankful that I got the chance to play a part that's so different from what people would've expected me to do. That was a really powerful moment for me when I learned that I got her, I just felt like she lived inside me!”
Is this role the ultimate moment of proving people wrong? “It would be so wonderful if we as a society could stop judging what people look like and stop taking that into consideration,” Frida says. “It's so incredibly harmful, especially to young women and boys where you're so attacked by the media and by images every single day of your life. It's so easy to compare yourself to other people. For me I've just learned that you can't compare yourself to anyone. Everyone has their own individual path. You're gonna do what you're meant to do, believe that, trust the process and try to stop caring about what other people have to judge you for or if they try to put you in any certain box, you just have to go well f**k that!”
Has that transition from modelling to acting and slaying the doubters along the way been a real lesson in self-belief? “Growing up I was never the beautiful one or the popular one. I was the geeky tomboy who could only play because my brother was in the same class and my brother was really cool,” she laughs. “Working in fashion, I've always had that imposter syndrome. I was always expecting somebody to call and be like, ‘you've fraud. How can we book you for this campaign?’ I never identified with that kind of ideal.”
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“It took me so many years to realise that, ‘maybe what I'm good at is not just looking a certain way, but embodying something.’ When I look back at the career I had in fashion, working with John Galliano or Jean Paul Gaultier, they were people that would push you into creating characters and to express something, to tell a story rather than to just be the face of something,” she continues.
“It took me well over a decade to go, ‘maybe I'm actually good at something,’ and then accepting to myself that ‘I want to act.’ But coming from a background where creative careers weren't a possibility, it felt like such a huge hurdle and then saying it out loud, ‘I'm gonna quit this career that I've done well in and I'm gonna move back to Sweden to try to become an actor.’ Then I was just trying to work and trying to read for things and it's been a long way to landing where I am now. But now I can pat myself a little bit on shoulder at least and say, ‘I gave it my all and then I'm proud of what I've done.’”
Frida should be very proud, Freydis is one of the most badass characters on our screens and it’s refreshing to see.\
Vikings: Valhalla season two is streaming on Netflix now.
