“I kind of imagine that she’s been on this homestead for most of her life, maybe doesn’t really remember the kidnapping or whatever happened to her,” she says. Doa portrays Melkorka, a garland-sporting Irish slave who leads a pagan song rite at a forest orgy. This sense of oppression surrounds not only the film’s core stars - a brooding Alexander Skarsgård, a frostily enigmatic Nicole Kidman - but the wider cast as well. Much of its visceral ambience is due to the density of Eggers’ and Sjón’s background research, which pummels every scene, every garment, every line. The Northman is incredibly atmospheric, a wet, cold, violent film doused in a sense of the cheapness of life. Luckily they said yes!” Doa says, laughing. When she heard they had written a script, she asked if I could audition. “My mother introduced the co-authors of the script, Sjón and Robert Eggers, when Eggers was visiting Iceland. Everything changed when I got a lead role in the school play in senior year.” That same year, she auditioned for The Northman. “Even then I didn’t really believe I could see it through. “We did strange plays and had the best, weirdest teachers,” she says. Throughout her childhood Doa was what she calls a “theatre girl”, and by 15 or 16 she had decided she wanted to be an actor, inspired by the groundbreaking theatre department at her school, Saint Ann’s in Brooklyn. “I felt like I was between the two lives.” The result, as the photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin put it, emailing from New York, is someone who is “a true cultural mix between her American and Icelandic parents.” “My whole life, I’ve always been missing a home,” she says. Doa went to two kindergartens, two elementaries, and two middle schools. From the start, her life was split between a flat in the West Village in New York and a stucco house in Reykjavik. Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney was born in London in 2002, the second child of Björk (who has a son, Sindri, now 35, with the Sugarcubes guitarist, Þór Eldon), and Barney’s first. “That’s where I am at the most creatively fertile.” She is daughter to a pair of towering cultural figures, is the thing: the Icelandic singer Björk and the American artist Matthew Barney.ĭoa is in Paris, “doing a little campaign,” she says, shooting for a day before returning to Reykjavik, where she lives in the ground-floor flat of her mother’s house. Whatever she does is greeted with a lot of interest and expectation, and this is, to use a Northman-circling cliché, a double-edged sword. She is also a maelstrom of imaginative ideas and creative production who made a beguiling short film entitled Almanak and sings with disarming intricacy, making music that nobody has ever heard before.

Earlier this year, she appeared in her first feature, Robert Eggers’ Viking revenge movie, The Northman.

Her warm smile comes with a flash of rose-gold tooth grills.ĭoa Barney is an actor. Then I spot her, apparently unrelated to all this: someone who, with her frayed brown jumper and bulging backpack, could be en route to a music festival. I lurch forward before realising this is not Doa. One young woman, who appears to be their centre of gravity and might well be 19, has a constellation of piercings. When I walk into the foyer of the luxurious Paris hotel at which Doa Barney has apparently just arrived, there is a group of people in a formation - cameras, clipboards, hierarchical vibe - that seems to imply fashion and its wider world.

Isadora barney instagram