Article by Sofie Kay Hulgaard
Rising star, Kristine Kay Larsen, born and raised in Denmark but is now making her name in Hollywood with 3 feature film releases in 2024. She’s also been in an array of series, one of them being the new viral show, Duke With Benefits.
Kristine swirls, and the eye of the camera is fixed on her. Like the audience in front of the Tesla coil lightning in Griffith Observatory, there’s a mesmerisation of the shiny reflections of her silver dress against the dark background. Right now, Kristine is Taylor, the
archetypical American girl-next-door dancing on her own. The leading actress in a series about a whirlwind romance and ‘making it’, despite a modest small-town upbringing. On the screen in front of the director, you could never tell that the dress is stapled to make a quick, perfect fit, or that the room is filled to the brim with people, costumes, tripods, lamps, unseen by the camera.
Kristine and I used to play ballet dancers in front of the box-shaped TV of our childhood home in Denmark. The 2001 movie Barbie in the Nutcracker put on repeat, as Kristine pretended to be every princess she saw on screen.
Almost twenty years later, I’m visiting her in Los Angeles. She’s living close enough to Universal Studios and Warner Brothers to look over the landscape made up of industry giants and the manufacturers of our childhood princesses. The inhumanly large billboards on the building walls advertising the newest features, are mirrored in the much smaller-scale posters plastered inside her apartment, with a La La Land sun permanently setting across the bed. “One day I’ll be in one of those,” she says casually, when we drive past the great production studios, stacked along one another like big barns of glamor.
Meanwhile she’s already making her name as an actress, having been in three feature films – The Black Box, Killer Girls, The Throckmorton Revelations – and multiple series in her first year of working in LA. It feels like watching her find our mom’s high heels, several sizes too big, admiring herself in her bedroom mirror, and stepping directly onto the Hollywood red carpet, heels now magically a perfect fit.
When we first arrived on set, the crew invited me to “watch the chaos unfold”. I like to think they recognized me as one of them, working behind the scenes.
Every single hand and foot seem to be electric in preparation for the shooting of a scene. There’s an urgency in every movement, a kinetic energy building, but somehow all the pieces of equipment and voices and bodies run smoothly through the room, like traffic on the six-laned highways that connect the city. Kristine cracks a joke that makes her co-star and sound crew laugh, relieving some tension. “Okay folks, let’s get started” says the director, a little impatiently.
The clap of the film slate prompts the crafting of a new reality. “ACTION” is yelled, wardrobe stands guard, watching for miniscule signs of a continuity error; it’s like the tripods and rods are clenching their muscles. Kristine shapeshifts; the expressions on her face, the words that come out of her mouth are fiction, as she transforms from Kristine to Taylor.
“It’s how four-year-old Kristine would do,” she later tells me. She creates dreamworlds and places herself in them. Even when she’s going on walks or washing dishes, she’s improvising, talking to herself. She is, in fact, a natural dreamer; when she was asleep as a child, I could find her sliding around the dining room table in her socks, far removed from reality, speaking to me as an ice-skating princess, as I guided her very carefully back to bed.
The day before we went on set, we ate lunch at a viewpoint on Mulholland Drive. She wanted to show me the city in its entirety, and I was excited about the Lynchian reference. I asked her about her dreams, the expectations of ‘making it’, that made her move to California. “I kind of imagined that I would be this starving artist.”
We’re speaking American English, pretending to be interviewer and interviewee, and not sisters from a European suburbia.
Kristine picks up a piece of kimchi and points outwards. The buildings are all flat and earthquake-friendly, while the contours of the hills create the illusion of still waves in a sea of city.
“I was informed by the movies about these struggling actors in Hollywood. But that never happened to me. Instead I figured that there’s multiple ways of making it. My dream when I first moved here was actually to only do acting full time.” “So you’ve kind of already made it,” I say, a bit surprised, mouth full of kimbap. “Yeah, you can say that. But now I want even more. So I’m starting to think that I might never make it, because it can always get better, and I’m always going to want to work harder.”
I get the feeling from the West Coast, that the roof has been taken off of our childhood home, and revealed it to be a movie set. Here, instead, is the real world. Everything is grander. The Pacific ocean makes the fjord at our parents’ house seem like a puddle. Even the yellow sky over the beach in San Clemente is big enough for billionaires to send rockets across. “CUT”, yells the director. It’s like somebody turns off the atmospheric Tesla coil with a giant switch. All the electricity on set is released with a sigh, and evaporates into the great LA sky. I hear Kristine laughing. “Så du det, Soffi,” she says in Danish, no longer playing Taylor.
