00:04
Louise Rosager
I chose Jacob's Struggle with the Angel by Oluf Hartmann. It just fascinated me so deeply.

00:12
Louise Rosager
The title indicates a struggle, but the image itself looks like Jacob is embracing the angel or the angel is holding him up. I learned that in the biblical story, Jacob thinks that he's struggling with a man, but it's actually God that he's been wrestling with.

00:33
Louise Rosager
What this image gives me is such a visual, visceral sense of how when we're really trying to transform something deep, it feels like a battle. It feels like we're battling forces that are so much greater than us.

00:50
Louise Rosager
But when we look back at it later on, what we realize is that those were the times that God was actually holding us, if we believe in God, or that the universe, the environment, was actually holding us because God was stretching our capacity to live that authentic life that we set out to live.

01:10
Louise Rosager
I'm always grateful afterwards of the struggles that I've had, as horrible as it felt at the time, because I grew so much from them. So that's why I chose that one.

01:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Louise Rosager, a Danish creative coach and dream tender. Welcome, Louise.

01:48
Louise Rosager
Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

01:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We are in my home in Glendale, a suburb of Los Angeles, where I've lived for almost 17 years. I've been in LA for 24 years. When did you arrive in LA and how did you choose where to settle in LA when you arrived?

02:05
Louise Rosager
I got here in 2006, so almost 20 years ago. And I moved here from New York and I moved for film and television, which I ended up abandoning not long after I moved here. I was not too impressed with Los Angeles at first. I had a very hard time with the distances and just the lifestyle and everything.

02:27
Louise Rosager
I really missed New York, and I really missed theater. I was driving down Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica and looking at the highrises there, and I said to my friend who was in the car with me, if I'm ever gonna live here permanently, I'm gonna have to get an apartment on the top floor of that building. And it'll have to be less than $1,000 a month.

02:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Whoa!

02:49
Louise Rosager
Yeah.

02:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Ambitious.

02:51
Louise Rosager
I know. Very ambitious. And not that long after, I was at a party, I saw a woman who had this beautiful long red hair and I really wanted to talk to her because she had really beautiful hair. So I struck up a conversation with her, and it turned out that she was subletting an apartment on the top floor of that building for less than $1,000 a month.

03:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow.

03:16
Louise Rosager
I guess it was meant to be. And soon after getting that apartment with ocean views and everything, it was fabulous. I started settling and started really loving it. And LA's been very good to me, I feel.

03:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And today you still call Santa Monica home, you live there with your son, he's six years old. How would you describe this part of the city to the listeners who've never been to Los Angeles? Los Angeles is a big city with small pockets of very different neighborhoods.

03:45
Louise Rosager
Well, Santa Monica is beautiful. I think what I love about Santa Monica is that it's accessible to the beach pretty much no matter where you drive. You can see the hills, you can see the Santa Monica Mountains. It's an upscale neighborhood. I would say my particular little pocket of Los Angeles has a lot of young families. So it's perfect for us because I'm there with my six-year-old.

04:09
Louise Rosager
When I first moved in there, my ex-husband, then husband, used to joke that you weren't allowed to live in the neighborhood unless you had a stroller. And so it's that kind of neighborhood. It's really family friendly, very walkable, with beautiful cafes and little shops in the very close vicinity. It's a lovely, tourist destination, but my part of the city is really quiet.

04:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you said that your relationship to LA in the beginning wasn't that great. How did it develop and how do you feel about the city today, 20 years later?

04:41
Louise Rosager
I love the city. I've had really an ongoing love affair with Los Angeles. I never really want to leave, even if I leave for fun reasons, even if I leave to go spend time in Denmark with my family, I find that I miss the place quite a lot.

04:56
Louise Rosager
I fell into a great temporary job when I first started. Very quickly, I just started falling into a crowd of people who were interesting, creative, full of ideas, full of ambition and passion for what they were doing. I have a really large network of friends here and my friends have become my LA family. It's just treated me very well.

05:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In LA, you met someone who became very important to your work, Kim Gillingham, an actress and a coach who founded the organization Creative Dream Work in 1999. She worked with some famous actors like Sandra Oh and Benedict Cumberbatch. How did you meet her and what was your initial attraction to her?

05:43
Louise Rosager
That's another very synchronistic story. I was teaching acting at the Santa Monica Waldorf School, and I struck up a conversation with a young kid named Sam, who was not in my class. We were just talking out in the playground after I was teaching and had a lovely conversation. He seemed really smart, very precocious, just such a storyteller I could tell already.

06:11
Louise Rosager
And a few days later, his mother came up to me and she said, you know, Sam won't stop talking about you. I was in my early 20s at the time. Would you consider maybe being his babysitter? And that was Kim Gillingham. So, Sam really brought me to Kim. I worked for her for a couple of years. I very quickly noticed that she was an interesting lady to say the least.

06:34
Louise Rosager
She had these books about dream work and Jungian analysis and those kinds of things. And I've been very interested in that because I was working very intensely with my own dreams, not knowing that anybody else was at the time.

06:47
Louise Rosager
And so I started seeing all of these books on her bookshelf. I started seeing all these celebrities going into her studio space in the back, and started asking her, what is it that you do and could I be a part of it? And then I just studied with her after that for years, and soaked up whatever I could, learned whatever I could from her, and that was transformational.

07:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Looking back now, how significant was this meeting for you and to your career and what you do today as a coach?

07:16
Louise Rosager
It was very significant. It started me on a totally different path. I'd been doing dream work just as part of my own character development. I would write a lot with the images that came through in my dreams. They would inspire me so much.

07:33
Louise Rosager
And so to find somebody who was doing the work that I was just intuitively doing, and that there was actually a framework and there was a supportive network of high level people who were doing this kind of work was just extraordinary. And the work itself is very transformational. It's such a mirror for what is going on in your inner life.

07:59
Louise Rosager
I don't know where I would be today if I hadn't met her, both in terms of what I do in my life as a career, but also just as a human being. Everything that I know about myself, how I work with myself, how I work with challenges, I pull a lot from what I learned from her over the years. And my entire creative process really was birthed in the work that I was doing in her classes.

08:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How long were you working with her?

08:30
Louise Rosager
I'd say about ten years, maybe more. I still dip in and out once in a while.

08:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So a significant amount of time.

08:36
Louise Rosager
Yes. Significant.

08:38
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Explain to us what it is that you do. If I go to you as a client, let's say, I'm an actress, just for the fun of it, and I want to improve my acting skills and utilize my dreams as a means to do this. How do we go about that together?

08:56
Louise Rosager
So the dreams really are, like I said, such a mirror of what is going on in your inner life. So there are two ways that I would work with this. I would work either specifically on the dreams or we would work on the material that you are cast in as if it was a dream.

09:15
Louise Rosager
Because what I believe and what Kim taught as well is that everything that happens in our life really is a dream. So if we're cast in a project, there are components of that project that are trying to call something out of us that we don't necessarily know about ourselves.

09:37
Louise Rosager
And so in order to individuate, in order to become people who are whole, people who can live their fullest creative expression, we want to know as much as possible about who we are. And so the dreams will always speak to that, and the dreams will always bring to our attention what we perhaps are not aware of in ourselves.

10:00
Louise Rosager
And so this is why dream work is such an extraordinary component of the creative process, because they illuminate all of the things that we do not know so that we can become more multifaceted artists and individuals.

10:15
Louise Rosager
So I will typically start by just talking about the dream, associating to the images that are coming through in the dreams. And then I will talk people into a more relaxed state, use some just very easy techniques of relaxation — physical, vocal relaxation — just to dissolve the edges of the ego a little bit, so there's not so much judgment about what might come through and so much censorship.

10:48
Louise Rosager
Because we all do that, right? We have these impulses or ideas and we go, oh no, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna go with that, that's weird. Or that's not who I am. And so in order to access that deeper, wider creativity, we want to just dissolve that a little bit. And then we start to work with the images.

11:09
Louise Rosager
I typically work with people with their eyes closed. We will meet the figures in the dream or the character that the person is playing from this more dropdown state and really start to see what is this image opening up for me? What is this character opening up for me? What happens when I see them from this place of somatic experience, soul experience, feeling experience, rather than just analytical, intellectual experience?

11:42
Louise Rosager
And that will open up so many things. The character will start to just come alive in ways that the actor we're not necessarily even expecting. Same thing with a dream image. You dream about your mom and you go, oh, that's just mom. But when we drop in and we see it very differently, from the eyes of the soul, it's a whole new experience.

12:04
Louise Rosager
And then we work with ways to internalize that. We work with ways to be able to call that forth again. Whether we are on stage or if it's a dream figure that we're working with, it might just be a daily practice of how can I inch closer to this energy again to become more whole. I give people some homework. I say, do this for ten minutes a day for the next couple of weeks until you come back and see what shifts. And that's what we do.

12:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Dreams have also helped you create characters as a scriptwriter. Talk about some examples of your writing that was inspired directly by your dreams.

12:43
Louise Rosager
I don't know if I ever created a script or a character that was inspired directly by a dream figure. My process usually has been the reversal of that, where I will get the idea for the scripts and then I will work with the characters as if I'm working with a dream figure, again, to find more substance and meaning in what the characters are and to get to know them on a different level.

13:10
Louise Rosager
But I've definitely added in character traits based on dream figures. And there's definitely been elements of the scripts that I write that are very influenced by what I see as a narrative thread in my dreams and also the dreams of others. Joseph Campbell said that myths are collective dreams and individual dreams are individual myths.

13:40
Louise Rosager
So I always try to look at what's happening in my dream life and what it looks like the dream is pulling me towards, what it looks like dreams that I'm hearing are pulling other people towards, and see if there's a commonality or a through line there. And then my writing becomes influenced by that.

14:00
Louise Rosager
Because I'm very interested in the possibility that storytelling could create new myths for our culture. And I think that what we write comes from the same source as what we dream. And so I want to honor that arc and that pull of the future that I see in dreams in my scripts as well.

14:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You've also done workshops where you act out dreams, like little stage plays. How does this work?

14:31
Louise Rosager
When somebody has a dream in a workshop, we will stage the dream as a mini play. So the dreamer will tell us the dream and then they will "cast" the different figures or characters in the dream. And they will do that with a community of other dreamers who are in the class.

14:52
Louise Rosager
So, I dream a dream where my mother's featured, and I'll ask this person over here, could you please stand in for my mother? And I'll just give a little bit of directions. This is what she does in the dreams. These are the things that she's saying and how she's behaving. And so the friend from the community will act that out to the best of their ability.

15:13
Louise Rosager
Why we do that is to create an externalization of what happens in the dream, so that the dreamer can get more of a visceral, felt sense of what the dream might be trying to tell them. And so we'll also ask the dreamer to switch places with the other figures and actually talk from that energy.

15:36
Louise Rosager
The dreamer can really start to understand this character in this dream. What are they trying to tell me? What might they want me to know and call out of my life? Because dreams will always give us material that we're not conscious of.

15:53
Louise Rosager
Carl Jung said, if you were conscious of the material that the dream offers up, you wouldn't need to have the dream. You would just go and do something else in your life and you wouldn't be stuck. So we want to inch our way towards consciousness around these figures, what they represent, what they might be trying to invite the dreamer to do differently in their lives. And so that's why we'll switch places with those other characters in the dream.

16:16
Louise Rosager
And it's always remarkable how much insight comes from just doing that. The dreamers will be like, I had no idea that this was gonna come out of me. I had no idea that this is what my mother in the dream was about. And just that little switch, it gets us out of the intellectual interpretations and into a much deeper layer of meaning in the dream. That's how that works.

16:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you write down every dream you've had every night?

16:51
Louise Rosager
I do. Yes.

16:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You do?

16:54
Louise Rosager
I do. If I have a dream, I write it down. I would say because I work with my dreams so intensively, I feel I don't get as many dreams as I used to. Because I really mine them when they come. And then I'm also a single mother with a six-year-old child who often comes in the middle of the night, that kind of breaks up the REM sleep a bit.

17:17
Louise Rosager
I'll tell you a dream that came recently. It's always just so mysterious, these dreams, they just always feel so mysterious. I was going to Mount Shasta with my mother and my son, and I didn't know that's where I was at first. But then I started noticing and I was so happy 'cause I loved the place up there.

17:41
Louise Rosager
And then sometime later in the dream, I was leaving this retreat that I had been at with a friend of mine named Craig. And Marion Woodman, who's a very famous dream worker and Jungian analyst, she passed away some years ago. And I was leaving this retreat and there was a fire, but we weren't really scared of it. I dream a lot about the fires after the —

18:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, the LA fires.

18:08
Louise Rosager
After the LA fires, that's been coming up quite a lot. We were leaving this retreat and we were all so excited and so sad at the same time because we'd had such a good time. And I was looking at Marion Woodman, and she just had these kind, blue eyes and she was looking at me with these kind, blue eyes.

18:25
Louise Rosager
And I woke up and I thought, that's the invitation, those eyes of this woman that I admire and who's really the highest expression of what you can be in this work. She's phenomenal. I was even listening to some Marion Woodman on the way here. And so I thought there's something about leaving a level of existence, which may have been training, generating strengths, retreating from the world a little bit to get the insights.

18:56
Louise Rosager
But now we're leaving the retreat, now we're moving into a different way of being in the world, a different way of working. And I felt that eye contact with her was just such a gift. And I know that I'll bring that with me as I go. I know this is the quality of experience that I want to cultivate and that I also want to bring to my work. So that's what I'm making of it so far.

19:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you dream in English or in Danish? And are your conscious thoughts during the day in English or Danish?

19:31
Louise Rosager
All English now, except when my son is a rascal, then I find myself speaking Danish. It just comes out. It's the funniest thing.

19:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So anger will trick the language?

19:42
Louise Rosager
When he really tests me — "Nu skal du lige holde op med det der." — Very funny. So all he knows how to say in Danish is words for chiding someone.

19:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's interesting. You mentioned New York before, which was your first stop in the US. How did you end up in The Big Apple?

20:03
Louise Rosager
I was doing amateur theater in Denmark, and I found a manager who lived in New York, or rather, he found me doing some play when I was 16. And so I finished high school and then I went to New York where he was to try out acting. I went on a student visa just to see. I went to acting school over there. And people thought I'd come back after a few months. I knew I was never coming back and I never did.

20:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you know already?

20:32
Louise Rosager
I just knew. And I was so obsessed with Shakespeare, obsessed with Shakespeare from a young age.

20:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
From a young age?

20:41
Louise Rosager
Yeah. From, gosh, I think ten is when I started being fascinated with Shakespeare. And at the time I didn't know what the words really meant, but I had a friend, we would read Shakespeare to each other in the English that we knew. We didn't know what it all meant, but we were —

20:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's a difficult language.

20:59
Louise Rosager
Yeah. But we were fascinated with the sound of the words and the language, and we would look it up. I mean, we were very nerdy. Other people painted their nails and went to parties. We sat around and read "The Scottish Play."

21:10
Louise Rosager
But really, over the years, I just got more and more fascinated by it. I taught myself vocabulary from translating Shakespeare to Danish so that I could understand it. And I just wanted to do Shakespeare in New York. I didn't really know —

21:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Why New York? Why not the UK where Shakespeare's from?

21:31
Louise Rosager
It's a good question. There was an attraction to New York. At the time, I just had an intuition. I think it had to do with just the Shakespeare that I had watched, the filmed theater productions that I had watched. I would connect much more with the American productions than with the English productions.

21:51
Louise Rosager
And I just wanted to learn how to do that. I went to New York on a student visa and ended up applying for work permits and got it. And then I found Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts. I ended up spending a lot of time there, training as a Shakespeare actor, training as a teacher, working on stage. And so living the dream that I'd had as a young teenager.

22:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What do you think it was about Shakespeare's play as a ten-year-old that spoke to you, and what continued that interest? That's a long time to be fascinated by something.

22:27
Louise Rosager
It's a curious thing. I don't know what attracted me to it as a ten-year-old. But I was so fascinated with the witches in The Scottish Play. When shall we three meet again? In thunder, lightning, or in rain? I just was like, yeah, I wanna learn more about this. And then I got into reading Hamlet.

22:46
Louise Rosager
I don't know if I really understood it, but there was something that just awoke in my soul when I was speaking those words. And the fascination continues to this day because those plays are just universal. They talk about the human condition, all of the facets of the human condition.

23:07
Louise Rosager
No matter what I am going through personally, I can find some Shakespeare that will help me move through it, that will help me alchemize that material. And I have an ongoing Shakespeare class that I teach weekly, which was started by a veteran, predominantly for veterans. Now it's everybody.

23:26
Louise Rosager
There's just such a possibility for people to be seen for who they are authentically through those words. And so it's just always exciting. I always say about Shakespeare, as long as you are truly yourself, the words make sense, the words resonate for others. So for me, I think like most of my work, it really is just a portal into authenticity and authentic creative expression, which is my greatest curiosity. I just love it. I just love it.

24:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And it was your interest in this that led you to your involvement with the tv series Will. You got the idea, I believe, which landed on TNT in 2017. You are an executive producer on the show. What does this mean in practice in terms of the job that you did on the show Will?

24:24
Louise Rosager
I did a lot of work on the show in the beginning stages. Yes, it was my idea. I got the idea from reading the sonnets when I was heartbroken and again, through very synchronistic circumstances, was able to find a producing partner on it, who really shepherded me in that process 'cause I was new to it.

24:43
Louise Rosager
I was 27 when we first sold the show to HBO — it was at HBO first. And what Vince Gerardis, my producing partner on it, said to me was, you have to become the person who's invaluable on this show, otherwise it's too easy to cut you out, 'cause I wasn't a name in the industry. So I researched everything that I could.

25:08
Louise Rosager
I made it a point to always have the answer for the showrunner, no matter what the question was. I would have that answer within 24 hours. I was lucky because I did come from a very sturdy Shakespeare environment on the East coast, so I had a lot of people I could pull from, and got to know a ton of different experts in England and all over the world.

25:33
Louise Rosager
And so my function on the show was development and research. And then, because it was my idea, I got that executive producer credit, and then I was in the writer's room helping the writers out with making the world seem authentic, understanding Shakespeare's mind through the plays, those kinds of things.

25:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The show followed a very young Shakespeare as he navigated the business of theater at the time in the 16th century. In a way, you can compare Shakespeare to the major players in Hollywood. The Globe Theatre was very commercial, and the entertainment there was really popular, often spontaneous and lowbrow. They didn't always follow the script. Do you see parallels between these worlds?

26:22
Louise Rosager
Oh, absolutely. And that was a large conversation when we were creating the show that the way those plays were written was very much like a tv writer's room, where there is a deadline, you have to get it done, you just have to churn out material, and that's what you're there to do.

26:38
Louise Rosager
Big budgets, too, on the Globe stage. And of course, the journey of getting to know yourself as an artist, knowing what it is you're contributing, who you want to be in that landscape absolutely, I think, was Shakespeare's journey. Also Shakespeare — when Shakespeare was writing, was not Shakespeare. He was just a fellow trying to make it in the entertainment industry.

27:05
Louise Rosager
So yeah, there were huge parallels between the London theaters, the competitiveness, the cut-throat, of that industry. And then, today's film industry. And we did talk about that a lot. That was one of the things that we felt made the show so relevant.

27:21
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's very fascinating. You have also used Shakespeare as a coach, for instance, with veterans in the Warriors For Peace Theatre. Why choose Shakespeare? Why not contemporary worlds?

27:33
Louise Rosager
So we do work with contemporary material too, but I have found that Shakespeare really lends itself to taking ownership of the things that you have been through. And particularly for veterans. It's interesting because they have been through a lot of the experience that Shakespeare's characters have also been through.

27:57
Louise Rosager
And so they offer a truth to the material that isn't always seen, because it can really relate to a lot of the text. And I think oftentimes for veterans especially, there's a lot of loneliness. There's a lot of isolation that happens after they come home. They can't really speak to their experiences because they're larger than life.

28:23
Louise Rosager
There really aren't that many formats that they can put that experience into, that will make people understand. The guy who founded the theater often says, he used to be the person at the party that people would say, oh, you were in Iraq, how many people did you kill? And that's really not the kind of conversation you want to have.

28:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
No.

28:43
Louise Rosager
But Shakespeare gives them the possibility to be very specific and speak to their experiences without actually having to talk directly about what happened. So I often call Shakespeare this mask of truth that they can put on and oftentimes they feel seen for the first time since they came back from deployment.

29:12
Louise Rosager
They feel they're finally able to be witnessed in what they've gone through, but in a safe way and in a very personal, very authentic way. And then this incredible community is created because everybody starts to go, oh, I understand my version of this. I've been through a version of this that might not be exactly the same, but I understand it.

29:32
Louise Rosager
And then again, you alchemize the raw material of feeling trauma, personal experiences into the text, and it becomes art. And Shakespeare's fabulous because he speaks to the whole of the human condition, but also the writing is genius. So all you have to do is start from where you are from that moment of truth that you are in right now, and then the text will just take you and it will play you. You just jump into the river of the text and it'll take you where you need to go.

30:06
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
There is a famous quote from Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, where Prospero says, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on." What do you make of it?

30:16
Louise Rosager
"We are such stuff as dreams are made on"? Oh wow. I think dreams really shape us. The archetypes of the dreams, the daydreams that we have, the way that we choose to see the world, is what shapes us. And dreams are really just such a blueprint of what is going on in our deep psyche, in our unconscious.

30:42
Louise Rosager
And I think they have more power than perhaps we are aware of. I think they live us as much as we live them. Carl Jung said, what isn't brought to consciousness comes to us as fate. And so what that means is that it's often the underlying things within us that shape our behavior, our patterns of reaction, and how we see others.

31:07
Louise Rosager
So the work then becomes coming to consciousness around, well, what is it that is actually in me that's making me do these different things? And the dreams will tell us that. So that's one aspect of it. And then of course there's the maxim that it's all just a dream. We are all just living a dream within a dream.

31:27
Louise Rosager
I think Shakespeare probably believed that too. I think he was a great mystic. I think he probably got some occult training and some very old knowledge was imparted to him somehow. Otherwise he couldn't have written what he wrote.

30:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Starting at a very young age.

31:45
Louise Rosager
Starting at a very young age. But his plays become more and more occult and more and more universally resonant as he grows older. His early plays really aren't that great. Sorry, Will.

31:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have to learn from doing.

32:02
Louise Rosager
Yeah.

32:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So let's depart from Shakespeare and go somewhere completely different. In 2011, you acted in a film about a Norwegian man who becomes the nanny of two young boys in Kansas called The Soccer Nanny.

32:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
He introduces soccer to them, which is not really an American thing. And it is a comedy about the cultural differences between Europe and the US. In particular, Scandinavia. As a Dane who plays a Swede in the film, what kind of talks did you have with the Norwegian lead and the rest of the cast and the director?

32:39
Louise Rosager
First of all, I just had the most fabulous time on that set. Apart from this cultural difference between Scandinavia and America, was the cultural differences between the gay community and the more straight community in Kansas. I think the director was really trying to juxtapose those differences as well.

33:01
Louise Rosager
We were fascinated with the ability of Danish people, or Scandinavian people, to just be more free with gender roles, be more allowing with sexuality and openness around gender issues. So I think it was really that conversation that he wanted to bring to the fore.

33:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
There was a line in the film when a waitress asks the Norwegian while showing him pastries. "Danish?" he asked, to which he answers, "No, Norwegian." In your experience, are there things that are lost in translation because of our different cultures?

33:41
Louise Rosager
Yeah, I think that's definitely a possibility. I'm noticing it, particularly with my son now that I'm raising a child. I think even though I have been here more than half of my life, I'm still raising him in a very Danish way.

34:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And what do you mean by that?

34:02
Louise Rosager
Gosh.

34:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I know it's a big question.

34:05
Louise Rosager
As an example, there is much more freedom around the body and freedom around gender, sexuality, kids being kids, being curious, all of these things. I would happily let my child just run naked on the beach. But not here in Santa Monica. It hurts me to think about that sometimes. You have to be so much more protective of children here than in Denmark, where there's so much more freedom and so much more safety.

34:36
Louise Rosager
And just also in the way that I raise him. I'm very hands off. That's not necessarily the experience that other parents have with their children. And I have been in situations, where I wondered if my approach to parenting was being misunderstood and misinterpreted as, oh, she's not on enough, whereas I just want to give him the freedom to explore and make mistakes and fall down and get back up again. Those kinds of things.

35:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Can you talk a little bit about growing up in Gentofte and whether you longed to go abroad or whether you just longed to be part of a Shakespeare play?

35:21
Louise Rosager
I longed for both of those things. I loved my childhood. I had the best childhood. Very contained, very supported, from teachers and family alike. And so I think I grew up with the notion that anything was going to be possible. And so I wanted to explore, I wanted to see if I could make a life for myself in a different place.

35:50
Louise Rosager
And I have family in California and since the first time I went here when I was ten, I thought, yeah, that's where I'm gonna be.

36:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
But you detoured to New York first?

36:04
Louise Rosager
I went to New York, yes. But I knew eventually it would be California.

36:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you find out that you wanted to be in the entertainment world? Did you know as a child that when you were reading Shakespeare, that this was your path, that you wanted yourself to be on stage and entertain people?

36:23
Louise Rosager
Absolutely. From the beginning I knew that's what I wanted to do, and then of course it segued into being behind the scenes more, which was unexpected.

36:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you explore that in Denmark?

36:38
Louise Rosager
Lots, lots. I did amateur theater. I did a ton of plays and just explored it as much as I could there.

36:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your son is six years old. Does he already share your interest in theater or do you discourage him to follow in mom's footsteps?

36:58
Louise Rosager
I encourage him to be who he wants to be, and be as many facets as who he wants to be. He goes back and forth. Sometimes he's really curious about Shakespeare, sometimes he's really curious about science. I just try to encourage him as much as I can in whatever is right for him.

37:22
Louise Rosager
He used to really dislike Shakespeare when he was little because Shakespeare took me away from him on the weekends. And I remember once he asked me on a Sunday. He said, where are you going? I said, I was going to teach Shakespeare, you know, the whole to be or not to be thing.

37:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The whole to be or not to be thing!

37:41
Louise Rosager
And he said, well, you know, mom, actually to be or not to be is not the question anymore. So you can just stay home.

37:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's a good one.

37:52
Louise Rosager
And I pondered it and I said, yeah, I think you're right. To be or not to be actually isn't the question anymore. It's more like, how do we live in the paradox and not in the either / or. I didn't say that to him 'cause he was three, but that was my takeaway from that.

38:07
Louise Rosager
But yeah, I do encourage him. I don't have any ambitions on his behalf. I try to be as neutral as possible 'cause I definitely don't want him to live my version of him or live some version of my unlived life or something like that.

38:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned before that he doesn't speak Danish, he understands when you scold him. So I assume that you guys are not moving back to Denmark anytime soon.

38:36
Louise Rosager
I would be surprised if we did. But life is full of surprises. Right now, we're happy where we are. He loves his life. I love mine. I don't see it, but again, who knows?

38:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My final question to you, what is still on your bucket list? What will you be doing for the remainder of your long life?

38:59
Louise Rosager
Great question. I think my bucket list has a lot to do with what I'm already doing. I just want to do more of it. I absolutely want to have an impact in the work that I do with dreams, with creative coaching. And I just want to widen that impact. I am very fulfilled. My bucket list definitely has to do with giving my son the best possible life, showing him the world, supporting him. I think that's all it's about.

39:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
On that note, thank you so much for being part of Danish Originals. We appreciate very much that you are part of it.

39:46
Louise Rosager
Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure.

39:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Louise Rosager chose Oluf Hartmann's Jacob's Struggle with the Angel or Jakobs kamp med englen from 1905 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.