Lea Mathilde Skar-Myren

Her Public Television Debut

Lea Mathilde Skar-Myren was born in Oslo in 2001 and grew up under the cold light of Norwegian winters. Her career didn't start with big red carpets. In 2018 she landed the role of Selma in the series Blank on the NRK network. It was a production that aimed to capture the essence of youth in the wake of the global phenomenon Skam.

She played a young woman looking for her place in the working world after finishing high school. The series ran for three seasons, but she was the focus of the first two. It drew a multimillion-viewer audience across the Nordic countries before she turned twenty.

Norwegian naturalism has these qualities.

That first experience taught her that the camera detects any trace of falsehood. So she decided to move away from classic acting tics. In 2019 she took part in the short film Fanny, exploring group dynamics in late adolescence. It was a small project that played at several local festivals.

International reach from the desert

In 2021 came the project that put her on screens around the world. The series Bortført was titled La chica de Oslo in Spain. Skar-Myren played Pia, a young woman kidnapped by ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula. It was a Norwegian-Israeli co-production distributed through Netflix.

The shoot was hard because of the weather conditions and the emotional weight of the character. But the actress avoided slipping into easy melodrama. She preferred to work through silence and physical restraint. In this story, the suspense depended directly on her gaze in captivity.

And the gamble paid off.

That same year she took part in the short film Hva hvis. It was a stylistic exercise that let her experiment with shorter formats before returning to big-budget television. She wasn't chasing quick fame but projects that demanded real physical effort. In 2021 she also joined the series Maxitaxi Driver in a supporting role.

Awards and a return to the suburbs

The year 2022 marked her definitive critical breakthrough. She starred as Monica in Kids in Crime. The series is set in 2001 and bluntly portrays the world of synthetic drugs in the city of Sarpsborg. She won the Gullruten award for Best Supporting Actress for this role.

It wasn't all smooth sailing.

She juggled that shoot with the series Fenris in 2022. There she played Emma in a rural thriller where wolves and human disappearances intertwined. The direction was handled by Simen Alsvik. Skar-Myren proved she could move from gritty realism to atmospheric suspense without missing a beat.

In 2024 she made the leap to genre cinema with Håndtering av udøde. The film adapts John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel about the dead returning to life in Oslo. The production budget exceeded four million euros and it was distributed in commercial theaters across several European countries. Filming of her next series, titled Viggo, wrapped at TV studios 2 during the winter of 2023.