Selina’s story
Rekviem for Selina (Requiem for Selina) creator Emmeline Berglund reflects on creating this six-part drama about Norway’s first beauty blogger, why it’s a show for the TikTok generation and how it has changed the conversation around beauty standards.
Rekviem for Selina (Requiem for Selina) tells the tale of Norway’s first beauty blogger, taking inspiration from the true stories of the first influencers in Scandinavia to follow one teenage girl’s pursuit of fame, affirmation and belonging.
Young, naïve and bullied by her classmates, Selina retreats to her bedroom, where she creates an online alter ego – Celina Isabelle – and imagines living a perfect life that she details on her blog. It leads her to go to dramatic lengths to change her appearance on her way to becoming the country’s biggest blogger and its most dangerous role model.
But don’t expect Selina (played by Elli Müller Osborne) to have any personal epiphanies by the time the credits roll at the end of the six-part series. “There are some plot twists, but there’s not the usual message that, in the end, you’re good enough as you are,” series creator Emmeline Berglund tells DQ. “It’s not that kind of story.”
Produced by Anti for Norway’s NRK and distributed by APC, the series debuted locally in March this year before winning four prizes – best drama, best actor in a leading drama role, best drama directing and best makeup – at the 2025 Gullruten television awards the next month. It also won the student jury prize when it was screened at French television festival Series Mania.
No one has been more surprised by the show’s critical and commercial success than Berglund, who has found that a variety of viewers across different demographics have been drawn to the show’s story, as well as the nostalgia of its early 2000s setting.
“It was a trip down memory lane for those who have grown up in this era, but for the adults, they were also surprised because they expected it to be something different,” she says. “They love that it was cultural commentary, with a message about the whole media industry.
“I also feel like it was almost like a healing journey, because one of the great inspirations behind the project is Norway’s biggest influencer,” the writer says of reality TV star and singer Sophie Elise. “She’s a very discussed character in the Norwegian media. She’s controversial in many ways, and she has so many haters, and I feel like somehow it was like people suddenly understood, ‘OK, so you are a terrible role model for young people, but you are not the problem. You’re just a symptom of a bigger problem.’ The unrealistic body standards that she gets accused of promoting, she’s also a victim of that. So I felt like the debate shifted a bit to more understanding.”
Elise was a consultant on the show and one of several influencers from Norway, Sweden and Denmark to whom Berglund spoke while developing the show, in which 17-year-old Selina finds solace in her online world, away from the harsh realities of living with her mother and going to school on a windswept island in the north of Norway. In her attempt to get revenge on her bullies sees, Selina ends up changing the world, as she goes from being an outsider who writes a diary on the internet to becoming a public figure with more readers than the country’s largest newspapers.
The series was initially born from a prompt by executives at commercial broadcaster TV2, who sought a dramedy inspired by modern influencers. Wanting a female writer to lead the project, they approached Berglund, who had previously worked with the network on shortform drama Hjerteslag (Heartbeat). “I was really honoured that they chose me, but at the same time, I knew nothing about influencers and I thought, ‘This is not for me,’” she remembers. “But I gave it a shot.”
Berglund started researching the phenomenon of online influencers, and was struck by the fact she didn’t know how it first started or where these new celebrities came from. In particular, she discovered the legacy of ‘pink bloggers’ – authors of blogs devoted to fashion, lifestyle and beauty – and found a strong connection to Scandinavia.
“Scandinavian pink bloggers paved the way for modern influencers, so it became this historical thing,” she continues. “I really fell in love with the thought of young teenage girls who wrote a diary online and, all of a sudden, they became the biggest celebrities and had all of this money and influence. I really wanted to follow a pink blogger’s journey from being a young, bullied girl to becoming this horrible role model.
“But it was a period drama, inspired by true events, and that wasn’t what TV2 wanted at all. So they were like, ‘Thanks, but no.’”
Berglund was “heartbroken.” She then pitched the idea to HBO Nordics, which came on board, but the project stalled again when Warner Bros Discovery shifted its focus away from original scripted series as part of the fallout from HBO parent Warner Bros’ merger with the factual content juggernaut. “It was horrible,” Berglund says. “Then NRK came to the rescue. The thing is, when we pitched it to the youth department at NRK, it really felt like coming home. Now I feel like the project always belonged there, in a way. That was the best outcome for the story.”
Writing the series with her brother Benjamin proved to be “art by accident,” with Berglund building on the synergy she felt with her sibling when he gave her script notes on a previous project. “The feedback I got from him was just mind-blowing, because he understood everything I tried to tell,” she says. “I don’t know if it’s because we have grown up together, but we just always have the same vision, and we’re always happy and disappointed about the same things.”
When they worked together, Berglund would do the physical writing, “but we had a writers room together, and we talk, talk, talk, and the writing is just what happens in the end, usually five minutes after the deadline. It has been amazing, and I’m the oldest one, so we have a natural hierarchy. I can boss him around.”
That shared vision for the series also included a fast storytelling pace. “We made it for the TikTok generation,” she says, “and also I’m impatient, so we tried this thing where I wrote and if I felt myself being bored, longing to get to the good part of the episode, we just changed the whole thing. We discovered that we could tell so much more if we just let ourselves skip the boring parts.”
The biggest challenge of writing the series came in determining how viewers might empathise with Selina. “She is a bit of a narcissist and selfish in many ways,” Berglund notes. “I didn’t want to give her a ‘Save the Cat’ moment where, no, she’s really just kind. I wanted to make people understand her need to get revenge on all the people who made her feel small.”
It was a storyline shared by many of the influencers Berglund spoke to. “So many of them were bullied girls, so they made a fantasy life and blogged about a life where they made it sound like they were more popular,” she says. “They made this alter ego, and they suddenly received a lot of love from the internet – and it got like an addiction. Everything in their life just started to evolve around their blog persona and the pressure to become that person they created on their blog. They told me the same story over and over again, and I wanted to tell that journey.”
For Selina, the things she wants and the things she needs aren’t necessarily the same, and she thinks the solution to her problems is to become beloved by the public. “But this is not the answer,” Berglund says. “She becomes this controversial character and the audience understands how she ends up becoming the most dangerous role model in her country.”
Casting the title character also came with difficulties. The production team saw 200 auditionees to play Selina, yet “we couldn’t find her,” Berglund says. Osborne was always in the back of their minds, but coming from the south of Norway, she didn’t speak the fictional northern dialect used by Selina.
Then one month before shooting was due to begin, “we were so fucking desperate,” the writer says. They called Osborne, auditioned her in her own Norwegian dialect and were wowed by her performance. The actor then had just a few weeks to learn the dialect needed for the show. “When I saw the casting tape, I just had goosebumps and I said, ‘OK, that’s her,’” Berglund says. “So she had one month to learn the dialect and she just nailed it. It was so impressive. Everybody thinks she’s actually from the north now.”
As the series creator, Berglund adopted a creative showrunner role, overseeing development and pre-production and working alongside directors Rikke Gregersen and Ole Sebastian Kåss to present her vision for the show. “Then it’s all about letting go, letting them be creative and owning the story while shooting,” she says.
But don’t expect to find her on set. “I hate the shooting part. I really hate it,” she says. “It gives me so much anxiety because there are so many things that can go wrong out on location. Then when the shooting was over, I came back in post-production and worked together with the directors. I’m much more hands-on in post-production than in the shooting part.”
Through making the show, Berglund’s own view of influencers has “changed completely,” after she descended into a “rabbit hole” exploring unrealistic beauty standards and the cosmetic procedures many young girls are pursuing. “It was really sad. I feel like it has changed my outlook on what I perceive as beautiful,” she says. “It’s a cliché, but imperfections are the things that make us human, and only you can be you. So all the quirks and the ugly parts of you are beautiful. It changed me.”
Selina’s adventures both online and in the real world may not be over either, as Berglund and Anti are now working on their next project. “I don’t think it will be the last time you see Selina on screen,” the writer teases, “but maybe not in the way one would think.”
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tagged in: Anti, APC, Emmeline Berglund, NRK, Rekviem for Selina, Requiem for Selina