Jens Albinus

Jens Albinus, the Danish actor known for his roles in Lars von Trier’s The Idiots and the TV series Ørnen, begins his conversation with Sørine Godfredsen by acknowledging something unpleasant a woman once told him: “Are you really aware of how much you moralize?” It hit him, he says, at a moment when he felt “completely lost in myself and also hit by the thought that I might be overplaying my role and in reality I don’t know myself as well as I thought.” That admission sets the stage for a conversation about restlessness, self-construction, and the difficult work of letting go of the need to be right.

The Restlessness That Never Leaves

Albinus does not claim to have overcome his restlessness. “I don’t subscribe so much to before and after,” he says. “I always have the restlessness with me.” He describes it as a constant, not something exhausting but a drive that has always been there. It traces back to early childhood: at three or four years old, lying under heavy blankets in a house near a highway, he watched car headlights move across the ceiling and felt something between fear and intense excitement. Later, walking alone to school at age six, he had a sudden, disorienting experience of being split — sitting in the kitchen at home while also walking the path. “It hit me with a terrible loss of control,” he says, “that there was something in me that was at the same t