Border star Eva Melander on her Oscar-nominated transformation: ‘My body was screaming’ (2024)

Tristram Fane Saunders

Border star Eva Melander on her Oscar-nominated transformation: ‘My body was screaming’ (1)

Eva Melander does more acting with her upper lip in Border than some actors do with their whole bodies in a lifetime.

She didn’t have much of a choice. Every other part of the Swedish actress’s face – including her eyelids – was hidden behind eerily convincing prosthetics to create the ugly, Missing Link appearance of the film’s heroine, Tina, a customs agent with a secret.

It’s a transformation that earned Border an Oscar nod for Best Makeup, putting the small Swedish film in the running against major Hollywood features Vice and Mary Queen of Scots.

That nomination gave a mainstream platform to a film that might otherwise have been doomed to cult midnight movie status. Based on a short story by John Ajvide Lindqvist (author of Let the Right One In), Border is a dizzying mashup of horror, steamy romance, grim police procedural and folkloric fantasy.

The glue that holds these disparate parts together is Melander’s understated performance. Her naturalism is no mean feat, given that she’s playing a…

“Don’t spoil it, please!” Melander mock-begs, with a laugh, over coffee in a London hotel. It’s one of the first things she says, after bounding into the room in a black roll-neck jumper and trouser-suit. With her sharp, intelligent blue eyes, blonde curls and electric grin, the 44-year-old couldn’t be further from forlorn, troglodytic Tina.

Border star Eva Melander on her Oscar-nominated transformation: ‘My body was screaming’ (2)

While her shy character struggles to look her customs colleagues in the eye, over an hour of animated conversation Melander barely breaks eye contact. It makes it hard to refuse when she asks me not to reveal the biggest of Border’s twists.

Regardless of what Tina really is, it’s clear from the outset she not like the people around her. “You could definitely read it as a coming out story, but you can weave in a lot of themes,” says Melander. “It’s about living in a context where you feel you don’t belong, and you don’t really understand why –being an outsider. Everybody’s dealing with that all the time.”

What makes Tina uniquely useful to the police is that she seems to have a kind of superpower: she can smell guilt, sniffing the air whenever a wrongdoer sidles past. Melander describes the character as “half human, half animal”. For research, she watched videos of police sniffer-dogs on YouTube, “really studying their breathing, how they had to kind of clear their nose to get it fresh”.

The videos helped her figure out how to create the perfect sniff, despite having her nose buried under heavy prosthetics. “Horses and dogs have a smell organ under their upper lip,” she explains. “Watching those sniffer dogs. I saw the nose and lip goes together.” It’s called the flehmen response: sniffing through the mouth, lip curled.

At the same time, she was working with a voice-coach to make her speech deeper and more gutteral. But how? “I have to show you!” she grins, and does so, letting out a long, low wail: “Aaaaaaaaaarrrrggggghhhh!” To my surprise, no-one else in the hotel looks up from their coffee. “You move your voice into places we don’t use when we talk,” Melander adds, once she’s got her breath back. “One time, my trainer just looked in my eyes and said, ‘Now you’re an animal.’”

Changing her voice was easy, compared to transforming her body. To play Tina, Melander put on 18 kilos in around 10 weeks, doing intensive body-building excercises four days a week, and forcing herself to eat a rich meal every 90 minutes. “It was totally horrible, because your body’s not made for changing drastically in that way,” she says. “I started sweating, and didn’t sleep well at night, and had those... moody times. I was longing to get into normal habits. My body was screaming, ‘Just eat something healthy!’”

To make matters worse, her sleep cycle was ruined by an exhausting filming schedule. Her make-up was only meant to take around two hours to apply; it ended up taking twice that. On a normal day, Melander might be in the make-up chair from 2-6am, in order to start shooting at 6.30am.

“It was so tiring,” she says. “You can’t sleep… I was trying to meditate myself through it. But it’s hard to meditate for four hours with people poking in your eye. I went through a lot of mindfulness apps, and I was thinking, ‘Wow, I’m going to be totally empty in my brain.’”

The long hours took a toll, at a time when Melander was still carrying the grief of a recent bereavement. “One year before shooting my mum died, so it was kind of a fresh sorrow going on within me. Sometimes I could use it [in the performance], but sometimes it was just there.”

Soon after she finished shooting, Melander had to play another challenging, transformative role – as Richard IIIin an avant-garde stage production of Shakespeare’s play. The kind of meaty, complex role she had always envied whenstarting out.

“When I went to acting school, I felt it was really unfair that my male mates in the class could be these big heroes and villains with big problems –but now I’m doing Richard III! I’m very happy we can do that today.”

Before moving to Stockholm to study theatre and psychology at university, Melander hadn’t imagined that she would end up as an actor, and glossy TV shows had almost put her off drama entirely. “When I was younger, watching TV I was a bit unsatisfied, because it was only ever TV people on the TV. I didn’t see the people on my street or in my family. This was Sweden in the Seventies. We had a lot of American TV and films –we didn’t see so much Ken Loach, you know what I mean?”

“I’m not from an acting family,” she continues. “My mum was an intensive care nurse, and my dad was an engineer. I was brought up in a small place outside a big town, between the countryside and the city. There was not so much to do in the sense of culture, but I’ve always been very curious about other people, watching, absorbing people around me - it’s like I’ve been collecting people since I was a kid, and I wanted to bring them up somewhere, onstage or in a film.” To relax in her spare time, Melander sculpts clay figures. “It’s the same!” she says, as if the thought has only just struck her. “I’m creating people and characters.”

In Sweden, Melander is already a familiar face, with leading roles in TV shows such as the Scandi-noir drama Rebecka Martinsson: Arctic Murders. But Border has made her an international star.

It wasn’t an easy role to land. It took more than 18 months of auditions for the film’s director Ali Abbasi to settle on the right actress. At a Q&A for Border’s London Film Festival premiere last year, he recalled the moment when he realised it could only be Melander. On her callback, she acted the scene where Tina meets her love interest Vore (Eero Milonoff). When Vore asked whether she liked insects, Melander did something unexpected: she blushed.“There’s this strong feeling of being in love for the first time,” she tells me. “You’re fractious and distracted and obsessed and, like, transparent.”

For Vore and Tina, creepy-crawlies are a sensual treat. The idea of finding something attractive in the strange and even disgusting certainly comes through in a visceral scene where the pair consummate their love. It’s easily the weirdest sex scene you’ll see this year. It must have taken courage to film, but Melander insists that “none of us were worried about it or saw that scene as very different from the others…though we did stop at one moment in between shooting and said, ‘This is such a crazy day at work, what do we do?’ But sometimes it’s better not to think too much.”

Border is out now in cinemas

Border star Eva Melander on her Oscar-nominated transformation: ‘My body was screaming’ (2024)
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