‘Vikings: Valhalla’ Star Frida Gustavsson Chose Runestones and Reading Lines Over Walking Runways
variety.comJordan Moreau Frida Gustavsson has walked the runway for the likes of Valentino, Chanel, Lanvin, Carolina Herrera, Fendi, Oscar de la Renta, Versace, Christian Dior and has even donned a pair of wings for Victoria’s Secret.
However, her most revealing walk in recent years, she told Variety, was a runestone walk she took with her father in her native Swedish hometown to do some extracurricular research for her leading role as Freydís Eiríksdóttir in “Vikings: Valhalla.”“I went for a runestone walk with my father, who is a history buff.
The Vikings left all of these wonderful runestones — they had erected stones with carved letters in the Elder Futhark alphabet, which is the 1000-year-old alphabet from Sweden,” she explained to Variety. “They are little remnants of a time long gone, but they are still scattered all over the area where I live and tell little messages of what it was like to live there and come back after traveling to England and returning home with gold.” As soon as Gustavsson landed the part of Freydís, she knew she had to make good to both the fans and her Scandinavian roots and learn all she could about Viking women.
She opened her old schoolbooks, she went to all of the museums, but not even the runes she saw with her father told her much — or anything at all — about the type of woman she would need to portray onscreen.
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