The 37-year-old actress Krista Kosonen's star status is steeply rising: After a long career in mostly Finnish films and TV series, she appeared in 2017 in the magnificent sci-fi drama Blade Runner 2049 and then as a tough cop from the Viking Age in the Norwegian HBO series Beforeigners (2019), whose second season is currently being recorded in Oslo.
In Tove (2020), Finland's contribution to the Oscar nomination with a Swedish premiere this weekend, she is the love of the author Tove Jansson, the dominant upper-class woman Vivica Bandler.
The common denominator for all the roles is that Krista Kosonen plays intense characters with a lot of weight, in faux fur.
Tough police in Beforeigners
In the acclaimed Norwegian social satire Beforeigners, completely inexplicable people from other eras appear in the port of Oslo.
One of these time travelers is Alfhildr, played by Kosonen;
a tough policeman who does justice in a "multi-temporal" team together with a burnt out, drug-addicted contemporary.
Integrating employees from the 11th century into a modern workplace creates difficulties and situation comedy, but Alfhildr also turns out to have a lot of life hacks from the Asa era that are very useful in police work on film, such as courage, contempt for death and stylish leather clothes.
The series is an allegory about a multicultural society that comments on the fear of strangers with humorous approaches.
For the role of Alfhildr, Krista Kosonen learned a fictional pretend-Old Norse language that was invented especially for the TV series.
Friend and muse
Kosonen also appears as a friend and muse in the two current films about significant Nordic female icons: in Tove about the author Tove Jansson and in Helene (2020) about one of the greatest Nordic artists, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946).
In the film Helene, everyone speaks Finnish, which created a great debate on the theme of history falsification and cultural appropriation, since Helene Schjerfbeck actually spoke Finnish Swedish and for a period lived in Saltsjöbaden outside Stockholm.