Inside ‘Her Private Hell’: Havana Rose Liu and Kristine Froseth on Nicolas Winding Refn’s Surreal New Film

Her Private Hell marks the long-awaited return of director Nicolas Winding Refn, and by the accounts of two of its stars, making it was every bit as strange and grueling as the film itself. Screening out of competition at Cannes this year, the horror thriller is the filmmaker’s first feature since 2016’s The Neon Demon, and its origins are as unusual as its dreamlike tone.

A Director’s Return From the Brink

Refn spent much of the past decade working in streaming television, a stretch he has joked earned him a lot of money. But the spark for Her Private Hell came from something far more dramatic. According to the director, he briefly died, the result of a leaky heart, and was gone for what he says was 25 minutes. When he came back, he found himself newly inspired to make a film.

The result is an enigmatic, lightly campy, and hallucinatory feature set in a misty, futuristic city terrorized by a violent serial killer known as Leather Man.

What ‘Her Private Hell’ Is About

The film follows Elle, played by Sophie Thatcher, an angry and depressed actress shooting a high-concept, Barbarella-style movie while her off-screen life unravels.

Elle is surrounded by a tangle of difficult relationships, including a strained bond with her father, a complicated psychosexual dynamic with a much younger former friend turned stepmother, and a maddening co-star who will not stop posing for selfies. She eventually crosses paths with a determined local soldier searching for his missing daughter, all while trying to avoid the looming threat of Leather Man.

Two standout presences in this surreal world are Havana Rose Liu and Kristine Froseth, close friends who recently shared a New York stage in the play All-Nighter. Ahead of the film’s French premiere, the two spoke about the emotional and physically demanding experience of bringing the film to life.

A Film Without a Real Script

One of the most striking aspects of the production was its lack of a fixed screenplay.

Froseth says she never even received a proper pitch. Her introduction to the project was a brief Zoom conversation with Refn, who latched onto the books on trauma and human behavior visible on her shelf. From there, the process stayed loose and improvisational.

Refn was openly uncertain about what the film would become, repeatedly telling his cast he did not yet know what it ultimately was. The actresses describe an approach that felt like an open-world video game, following their characters wherever the story drifted. They explored their roles individually while also discussing the bigger symbolic ideas at play, including archetypes of hero, villain, and victim, and the interplay of masculine and feminine.

A script did eventually surface, but only briefly. Liu recalls a copy being hand-delivered to their home for just a few hours, long enough to read quickly but not to photograph. The versions changed dramatically over time, though the core threads remained: a daughter with a fraught relationship to her father, a future unreality, a father searching the past for his child, and a serial killer tying the stories together.

Learning a Whole New Way to Act

For Liu and Froseth, the hardest part was adjusting to Refn’s deliberate, almost trance-like style.

The two had just come from their high-intensity play, where they spoke quickly and performed big. Her Private Hell demanded the opposite. They describe being directed to move and speak like dolls, slowing down to the point of near-meditation, often barely breathing inside stiff, sculptural costumes.

That adjustment was brutal at first. Liu only half-jokingly calls the opening week of filming “our private hell,” recalling that it largely consisted of crying and feeling unsure how to perform at all. Refn, whom Froseth nicknamed the Riddle Man, offered poetic guidance like the recurring phrase “Nothing is everything,” which the cast was left to interpret for themselves.

Filming could be punishingly repetitive, with takes stretching into the dozens. Froseth recalls one cut scene running to around 60 takes, with Refn standing beside the lens, constantly urging her to slow down and calm down.

A Friendship That Carried the Shoot

Through the emotional intensity, the friendship between Liu and Froseth became a genuine anchor.

Living in the same apartment complex during the Copenhagen shoot, the two leaned on each other heavily. They describe rehearsing together, sharing snacks, crying together, and pulling each other out of anxious spirals. Froseth credits Liu with grounding her by fact-checking her worst-case thinking, while Liu describes Froseth as a relentless cheerleader who once bought her flowers after a hard day.

Their dynamic even survived a memorable “tough-love phase,” when Froseth pushed them both to hit the gym and power through. The shoot, they say, mirrored a Danish hot-and-cold sauna ritual: cold, doll-like stillness on set, followed by warm summer afternoons spent jumping into the water.

The Most Punishing Scenes

The film’s emotional climaxes pushed both actresses to their limits.

Froseth describes hyperventilating and shaking after a single take of an intense scene, telling Refn she could only give him one. Filming in chronological order, she says, made the characters’ trauma feel disturbingly real that late in the shoot.

Liu’s experience was just as draining. She estimates one climactic scene was shot around 85 times, leaving her feeling like an empty “cicada shell” by the end of the day, drained of voice and energy. In one moment heavy with mist, after weeping through countless takes, the crew told her they could not even see her on camera. She describes the entire process as an exercise in total surrender, doing a scene again and again while never feeling she had fully captured it.

That same 85-take marathon, fittingly, included the film’s now-infamous scene of the characters barking at each other like dogs, with the actresses cycling through different animals, a hyena, a Chihuahua, a wolf, just to keep it alive.

The Bottom Line

Her Private Hell is shaping up to be one of the more unconventional titles at Cannes this year, born from a director’s near-death experience and built without a traditional script. For Havana Rose Liu and Kristine Froseth, making it meant surrendering to uncertainty, enduring an emotionally exhausting shoot, and relying on each other to get through it. The result, by their description, is a strange and hypnotic film, and a filmmaking experience neither will soon forget.