Meet Anders Danielsen Lie, the film star doctor

In GP mode in Norway

Worst Person’s director, Joachim Trier, has described him as Norway’s Daniel Day-Lewis, a reference to the actor’s decision to become a cobbler. “Instead of going to make Italian shoes, [Lie] will be removing appendixes,” Trier said.

“Managing these two careers is hard, just making the calendar work out. But for the past 17 years I’ve been trying,” says Lie, who is softly spoken, serious but also extremely droll, rolling his eyes at the dottiness of the situation. “It’s an ongoing crisis — acting and being a doctor are two sides of me and both are important for my identity.”

It’s a crisis that Lie — who, and this cannot be coincidence, is the son of a psychiatrist father and actress mother (“Freud would have something to say about that”) — has been grappling with since he was ten, when he won the lead in a Norwegian film called Herman about a boy who suddenly loses his hair. The film was a hit domestically, but convinced Lie he’d never act again.

“My mum heard they were looking for a boy my age and got me to audition. I didn’t know what I signed up for and all along I remember thinking, ‘Acting is not right for me.’ I’m a very neurotic person and I found it exhausting to go through all the nerves and fear,” he says, with Nordic frankness.

With Renate Reinsve in The Worst Person in the World

“I found the experience overwhelming, an emotional rollercoaster, even at ten I felt the pressure of being the lead role, the anxiety of not delivering a good performance. And I found the transformation from myself into another character fascinating but almost scary. It felt like playing with explosives.”

After that Lie didn’t act for 16 years. “I didn’t think I was psychologically fit to go into the profession, even though I found it interesting.” Although his “liberal” parents put no pressure on him in either direction, he put all his energies into preparing for medical school.

But in 2005, just before his final year of studies, he was approached by the up-and-coming director Trier who, remembering the childhood role, asked if he’d audition for his film Reprise.

“I read the script and thought it was fascinating, so I decided to give it a try and ended up getting the part. But to make it I had to take a year off from med school. And that film changed my life.”

Such was the film’s critical acclaim (it’s the first in Trier’s Oslo Trilogy of which Worst Person is the culmination) Lie was tempted to change direction. “I felt, ‘OK, maybe I could do something more with acting.’ I was so close to becoming a doctor it would have been idiotic not to finish but I decided I’d keep the door open for any interesting projects.”

Such projects turned out to be plentiful. Lie graduated and went into general practice, but kept taking sabbaticals to appear in several high-profile Norwegian television series and films. Internationally, he has played the mass murderer Anders Breivik, who shot dead 77 people in 2011, in Paul Greengrass’s Netflix film 22 July and appeared alongside Kristen Stewart in the psychodrama Personal Shopper.

“It doesn’t go down well at all,” Lie says, grinning, when I ask how his bosses respond to endless requests for sabbaticals. “But they know me by now and they know this is what they’ve signed up for.”

Throughout, he has grappled constantly with whether he should choose one career over the other (just to make life even more challenging, he has somehow also found time to record an album). “Many times I have said to myself, ‘Why do I do this? What’s the point? I have to commit myself to just one of these very time-consuming occupations.’ ”

Decision time might come with The Worst Person in the World, a witty coming-of-age indie film about gorgeous middle-class Norwegians living in tasteful flats, drinking fine wines and debating questions of existentialism, as well as whether it’s acceptable to like your ex’s Instagram selfies.

Despite its arthouse vibe, the film’s themes of love (and death — but no spoilers), youthful insecurities and middle-age nostalgia, have struck a huge chord with audiences internationally, with it being described as a 21st-century Annie Hall.

It has Oscar nominations for best international film and best screenplay. At the Baftas it was up for best film not in the English language and best actress for its dazzling female star Renate Reinsve, who plays the indecisive millennial girlfriend of Lie’s cartoonist, a Gen-Xer suddenly adrift in a world of wokery.

Overnight, social media has been packed with memes celebrating this “Covid-19 hero” and our “hottest actor-doctor.” The website Vulture.com suggested — not entirely tongue-in-cheek — an “AndersFest” where we spend a day watching the “hunk” first in Worst Person, then Lie’s other film on release, Bergman Island, while eating Norwegian kneippbrod and gravlax, washed down with aquavit.

“It’s very flattering,” Lie says, beaming over Zoom from his Dublin hotel room where he’s plugging Worst Person at the city’s international film festival. “We hoped the film would resonate but we never expected it to have this kind of impact. It’s a bit unusual for us to experience commercial success like this.”

This is the moment when Hollywood often comes calling. But although Lie, who — to add to his tick-box “perfect man” reputation — has two young daughters with his wife, the Norwegian model Iselin Steiro, admits he wouldn’t mind playing a James Bond villain, for now he’s fully intent on returning to his practice, which — after all — informs his acting.

“After a movie, it sometimes feels good to go back to real life in the literal sense of that word, because medicine feels like a real job, while being in the film industry you sometimes feel like you’re in a bubble,” he says. “I need to have some kind of contact with the real world, it’s what I was trained to do. And I wouldn’t feel confident enough to play characters if I didn’t know their reality. As a doctor, I meet people every day in extremely emotional situations, so it feels like I have access to a database of human drama most actors don’t have. I feel extremely grateful for those experiences.”

Patients, he says, “regularly” ask for selfies. I try and fail to imagine myself discussing my blood test results with a British star — say Rory Kinnear or Tamsin Greig — and wondering if they really knew what they were talking about. Is he met with similar scepticism?

“No, my patients know me. Hopefully I’ve been practising long enough they don’t also see me as a dilettante.”

Lie thinks that the anxious traits that made him consider himself unsuited to acting are the same that make him a good GP. “I’m always worrying about my work — should I do more tests on that patient, or whatever — that’s one of the good things about being a neurotic doctor! Occasionally I’m awake all night over my patients, but I do think you should give yourself a break.”

In most respects, however, Lie thinks the two professions have only one asset in common. “In both, you have to be able to establish communication with people you don’t know very well, either to play the scene or in order to get information so that you can give someone a diagnosis and the right treatment. And being a doctor sometimes involves roleplay in the sense that you have to adjust and play different roles for different patients to get the information you need diagnostically, but also to make the patient feel seen as a whole human being, not just a medical problem.”

Events of the past two years have thrown the dissonances between Lie’s parallel lives into sharper focus. “I’ve felt the contrast more than ever. My weeks were packed with Covid, I hadn’t thought about movies at all for a long time, then I got a call to say Worst Person and Bergman Island had been selected for the Cannes Film Festival. Travelling there, with this strange medical event also going on was . . . quite weird.”

Yet in many respects, Covid has only strengthened Lie’s resolve to keep acting. “People tell me how my doctor’s work must feel so much more meaningful right now, and I feel very privileged for having had the opportunity to work during the pandemic.

“But at the same time, during the pandemic, film’s been extremely important. We’ve all felt the need to go to the cinema again, just for entertainment and sometimes for more therapeutic reasons. So more and more, if life allows me, and if the work I do is meaningful, I’m going to try to continue just the way I am now.”