Exclusive Interview: Amalia Holm Talks Delete Me, Using Her Voice, and the Motherland: Fort Salem Fandom

Amalia Holm is a transformative storyteller who has brought important narratives and characters to the screen in projects including Den sista sommaren, Alena, and Motherland: Fort Salem, creating a lasting impression on audiences. This spring, she reprises her role as Marion in the Norwegian must-see drama, Delete Me.

Delete Me follows two teenage girls as they approach their high school graduation – in Norway, marked by a month-long party called Russefeiring. When one of the girls’ sex video is leaked, it opens up an exploration of friendship, deceit, and the dark side of social media.

Pop Culturalist was lucky enough to speak with Amalia about Delete Me, being a voice for women, the show’s second season, and the support she’s received from the Motherland: Fort Salem fandom.

PC: Throughout your career, you’ve brought so many important narratives to the forefront. What was it about Delete Me that attracted you to this project?
Amalia: There were several things about Delete Me that attracted me to it. It was mesmerizing. Initially, it was the notion of speaking up and being a voice for women of a generation where your expression can be taken away from you—and the minefield of exploring your sexuality and exploring the social arena of high school and the early years of college.

As I continued to read the scripts more and I got to meet Thea Sofie [Loch Næss] who plays Marit, it ended up being more about this super, super intimate friendship and how relationships that are that intimate and feel solid can be rocked and how the colors of your personality and characteristics as a friend stand through a storm like the one that we get to experience in Delete Me, which deals with social pressures and social climbing. Who is going to be there for you? Are you going to be there for them? Will you understand when you’re in power or when they’re not in power? Will you reach out to that person?

In the series, we don’t label Marit or Marion’s sexuality. They have a very, very close friendship. The boundaries of their relationship aren’t crystal clear. With all the things that are happening as they go through this coming-of-age ritual in Norway, they’re tested. It shows how immensely human they are in that situation.

I also loved that Marion was such a go-getter in a way that I haven’t played before. Because she’s not really good at what she does, and she’s very flawed in trying to reach her goals.

PC: You’ve played so many powerful female characters throughout your career. Who are the women in your own life who shaped the storyteller that you are today?
Amalia: Oh, wow. That’s a beautiful question. There have been friends and elder cousins who have meant so much to me in terms of expanding my world socially and morally. But there are my two grandmothers…a little more my paternal grandmother. She has meant a lot to me, not only in how she led her life with love and forgiveness but also with ambition. Then my own mother as well. She has let nothing stop her in what she wants to do. When life has hit her hard, she’s come back even tougher. I would say those. But I’ve also met such amazing colleagues. There’s something about actors or creatives in general that makes them expressive and transparent about their emotional life. I find if you just sit and listen to the colleagues that you’re working with that you’ll learn so much about how to navigate life and its pitfalls.

PC: I was reading on social media that your fans were actually nervous to watch you in this series because it’s so timely, intense, and gritty. Did you feel any pressure heading into this role? Were there any nerves?
Amalia: There were some nerves because of the explicit scenes that I knew were going to be in it, especially in terms of my paternal grandmother. She’s very Christian, and I felt like I had to sit her down, especially with this being a Norwegian show. That’s my Norwegian family. I knew she was going to watch it and people were going to talk to her about it and the sex tape that surfaces in the first season. She said, “This is an important story and somebody has to tell it, so why shouldn’t it be you?” That meant a lot to me. It was good to have that going around the rest of the family and telling them that she said that because then they didn’t have anything to say against it. [laughs]

It’s been interesting to show the fans of Motherland and of Scylla the Norwegian world and the Norwegian part of me. Marion, in contrast to Scylla, is very human in the sense that she’d love to be a go-getter but she isn’t really one. Scylla grew up leading a very tough life and has always been on the run whereas Marion grew up in a safe and sound environment in Norway with middle-class parents. But she wasn’t content with her social position. There was a switch in her later teens where she was like, “Yes, I’ve been doing my biggest hobby which is synchronized swimming and I have my best friend, but it’s not enough for the person I want to be.”

She felt like time was running out and there had to be a drastic change. For that, she would have to sacrifice a lot in her life—though not as much as she would go on to. [laughs] She doesn’t have a naive view on the world, but it’s a very human one. She has a relatively protected view of the world and is not prepared for what happens to her. Whereas Scylla has this armor and these tools to navigate the world and manipulate things, Marion doesn’t. You can see everything on her face—her dreams and needs.

When she’s put against her best friend one-on-one at the initiation party that the coolest girls are throwing, it’s almost hard to watch, and it was kind of hard to play because when you’re that vulnerable and will do anything to get on that bus, which is what they’re trying to do, it’s hard not to open my heart for that. They’re supposed to be twerking. It’s really cringeworthy. It’s embarrassing. But she doesn’t feel that. She doesn’t have that view of herself. She’s just full-heartedly in there. I love that about her. It’s very lovable. She deserves so much love. But it was an interesting contrast, as you said, in comparison to all the stronger or more action-led women that I have portrayed.

PC: There’s so much vulnerability that’s needed for a role like this, and you brought so much nuance to that. As an actress, how did you create the space for yourself to tackle that journey that unfolds in Season 1?
Amalia: Wow, amazing question. I would say that a lot of it was grounding myself with whatever I needed. Like I mentioned, I needed for my own sanity to have that conversation with my grandmother. I needed to ground myself in different ways within Norwegian culture to be able to tap into where my character was going.

Then, practically on set, it was about getting to know my costars. They are amazing people, both Sjur [Vatne Brean] and Axel [Bøyum], who I had my sex scenes with. They’re brilliant, brilliant people. They were so respectful. We felt like a total team.

Then it was having a very transparent conversation and constant dialogue with the show’s creator and director, Marie Kristiansen, because she had a very strong vision. We needed to communicate our respective boundaries, needs, and wants to be able to achieve our common artistic goals.

PC: As you were saying, Marie wrote and directed this series. Is the filming experience different when the person who created this world is also at the helm directing? What was that collaboration like?
Amalia: Yeah, it’s very different, I must say. In a way, it’s really interesting how different it is. This has been written in their heads. They’re the ones trying to make it happen. So therefore, their vision is crystal clear, at least from what I experienced with Marie. It’s really cool though because if you had a suggestion and she agreed with it, it was easy to change the scene around because the writer is there. She’s present and in charge, which I loved.

To have a direct line to a writer is always golden. We had that as well with our showrunner on Motherland. I find that when the writer’s voice is present, it makes all the difference in the confidence it gives us. You understand why the words are there and why they’re the way that they are.

For me, it was also very helpful because Marie had done so much research. She’s from academia. She’s written these big theses on female sexuality on TV. So I knew that whatever she was putting in there is symbolic, has a rich history, or is frequently referenced in other cultural pieces. That was very interesting and raised my confidence in her.

PC: We were talking about vulnerability earlier. Marie really leveraged a lot of close-up shots to allow audiences to feel the emotions that these characters are feeling. How challenging were those scenes compared to others that you filmed for the show?
Amalia: It was. In Season 1, we made the creative decision to use body cams, which was really cool. It’s a fifteen-kilo camera that looks like the ones they use for TV shots, and it was put on me through a rig. I had the camera on me. We would do a lot of running scenes with that. We used that when Marion gets to school after the video has been leaked and everyone is reacting to it. It was cool to be able to figure out how to work with that new way of filming. I’d never done anything like that.

It was almost harder before I got used to it because the camera is so close. The challenge for an actor is always to be like, “Don’t mind the camera.” But when it’s on you, you can’t do that. How do you not mind the camera? I didn’t want to look around it, but I absolutely did not want to look into it. That was a whole new technical challenge that made this project so much more fun. I love a challenge like that.

PC: The second season is out now. We know that you can’t say too much, but what can you tease about where we find Marion in Season 2?
Amalia: It’s a huge shocker in terms of where we found her initially in Season 1, depending on which way you watched it. Because it was a creative decision that Marie made to put everything in reverse order, which was something that she pulled off and that worked. I don’t want to say that Marion doesn’t get the ending that she deserves, but it’s a very humane ending. I keep coming back to “humane” because she knew what she wanted, but there’s something about being in your late teens and being under a lot of different pressure that can rock your intuition or your direction in life, at least from my own experiences. I find that’s what happened to Marion as well. She knows exactly where she wants to go, which is Miami. She wants to be a professional synchronized swimmer. Because of everything that happens to her, she doesn’t. She doesn’t see another option. Everyone is calling her a slut and projecting all these things onto her. She decides to take that and make it her capital and use that as her force going forward in life. She’s still so young though. I don’t see that this is the final path for her.

I think it’s really, really impressive when someone goes through something like that and they turn it into a new direction. Eventually, maybe she really grows into it and that is her chosen path in life, but unfortunately, I view it as she’s not where she wants to be. It’s where she’s felt forced to end up. She’s learned to own that position. I find that in a lot of ways is the same for Sana. Sana had a vision for her life. She was rocked in her core. Now, she’s ended up in a different world, and she’s trying to navigate that but with the same tools and impulses that she did in high school, and it’s not working. Things are different when you’re out in the real world. It’s a huge shift from Season 1 to Season 2 as they progress and leave high school. While it was a very, very toxic bubble, it was also a predictable world. In Season 2, they’re out in the real world, which is totally unpredictable.

PC: Great teaser. You also starred in Motherland: Fort Salem, and that fan base has been unwavering in their support and have supported all of your future endeavors, Delete Me included. When you got cast for that project, could you have imagined the impact that it would have had?
Amalia: Not at all. I knew it was the biggest project that I had ever had and also one of the coolest roles that I had ever been offered. I understood that it was going to change life as I knew it, and it really did. But I did not predict that a fandom would become such a big part of my support system or such a big part of the love in my life. That was a very cool new experience.

It’s a fortunate feeling for anyone who is on the receiving end of that. It’s also really wonderful to be an active part of the fandom because of the creative love that you share. When you love a show or a character, you share a common view that you might not otherwise have with people in your day-to-day life. But someone has seen that element of humanity or that element of being alive and written that in a character. There’s a story surrounding it, and someone else is stepping into those shoes and seeing something similar that they’re then able to portray. It’s like everyone who is intrigued by or who likes Scylla or the way that we portray her is also a part of this creative crew in a way. It’s been a wonderful surprise. I didn’t see that coming at all. I was not expecting that there would be people who, because of liking what I did, would follow and watch Delete Me and accept Marion into their hearts. That means so much to me because they are so different. But in my eyes, the fandom has seen the same core values and energies in the two and that’s so wonderful.

To keep up with Amalia, follow her on Twitter and Instagram. Watch Delete Me on Viaplay today!

Photo Credit: Nicolas Peyrau/Viaplay