Kristine Froseth Finds Herself in ‘The Buccaneers’
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Kristine Froseth is used to being the new girl. The New Jersey-born actress moved from Norway and back every few years for her father’s banking job, seesawing between friendships and cultures. Due to her nomadic lifestyle, she struggled to find herself during her formative years, she says, similar to her character Nan St. George in Apple TV’s The Buccaneers.
“I just wanted to fit in so desperately,” Froseth tells Rolling Stone. “So, I adapted to whatever people were doing. I was a chameleon.”
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In The Buccaneers, whose finale dropped Dec. 13, Froseth’s clumsy yet strong-willed character deals with her own identity crisis. She and her American friends are invited to London and immediately thrust into the “cattle-like” marriage market. Unexpectedly, Nan finds herself in a love triangle between Guy (Matthew Broome) and the Duke of Tintagel (Guy Remmers) and to further complicate things, she learns that she’s an illegitimate child — a secret that harms her chances of becoming a duchess.
The 28-year-old actress speaks excitedly with Rolling Stone, delivering sweeping hand gestures and grinning between pauses. She says she hasn’t watched Bridgerton, despite comparisons to Netflix’s sultry period drama (which announced their Season Three premiere dates Tuesday) or HBO’s The Gilded Age. Instead, she referred to Saoirse Ronan’s Jo in 2019’s Little Women, who has an inseparable bond with her sisters and questions her independence within traditional 19th century society.
In the Apple TV+ series, based on Edith Wharton’s unfinished novel The Buccaneers, the champagne-slugging, party-throwing Americans butt heads with the uptight, ruling class of England. Created by Katherine Jakeways and directed by Susanna White (Andor), the eight-episode series takes a feminist approach to 19th century London, weaving in modern motifs and messaging.
Despite parallels to the popular Netflix series, White tells Rolling Stone that the series is a “different animal” than Bridgerton and began its development process before the Netflix show was released in December 2020. Although The Buccaneers includes debutante balls, minutes-long confessions of love, and contemporary pop ballads, White says the series examines social pressures, female autonomy and queer relationships, along with sexual assault and humiliation.
“I fell in love with this book a long time ago when I was at college, so I never set out to make Bridgerton in making it,” Jakeways says. “I wanted to make something that was truthful to the spirit of Edith Wharton.”
Taking place in the Gilded Age, White says the costumes and cliff-top castles were true to the 1870s, but they relaxed the young women’s behaviors and manners so that they would appear to be from a different time period.
“The thing I love about it is that you really feel the energy of what it is to be 19 and the excitement of going to the other side of the world and what that might’ve been like,” White says.
Froseth shares she would have watched The Buccaneers at age 15, not only for the Vampire Diaries-like love triangles but to watch someone who was so sure of herself.
When building her character, Froseth says Nan embraced her masculine side, loosening up the tight corsets, wearing short hairstyles, and swapping floor-length skirts for trousers in Episode Six. If it were up to her, Nan would sport a blazer and black tie.
“She was probably resenting the feminine in the sense that you should look like this and have a big chest and wear dresses,” Froseth offers. “It’s uncomfortable and it’s painful and it’s just not right. She wants to run. She wants to move. She wants to be equal.”
While Froseth plays the heroine in The Buccaneers, in 2022 she starred in Lena Dunham’s Sharp Stick as Sarah Jo, a 20-something young woman who undergoes a sexual awakening with a married man (Jon Bernthal) after a traumatic hysterectomy as a teenager.
The film received criticism on Twitter, now known as X, by an autism activist who said she was previously asked to consult on Froseth’s character but was ghosted after Dunham clarified the character would not be autistic. A Sharp Stick spokesperson told Variety that the character was based on Dunham’s own experience and was “never written nor imagined as a neurodivergent woman.”
Froseth, who reached out to the activist ahead of filming on Sharp Stick, says she read the script enthusiastically and, during a call with Dunham, began to understand her character’s journey.
“It created conversations, which I think is exciting about the piece,” Froseth says.
In 2022, director Cary Fukunaga (No Time to Die), who Froseth was romantically linked to, was accused of sexual misconduct and exploiting his power to openly pursue much younger women on his sets, including by three women from his TV and commercial projects. Actress Rachelle Vinberg (Betty) called the director a “groomer” following their friendship that became romantic, and twins Cailin and Hannah Loesch (Maniac) also came forward to accuse the director of a troubling “hot-and-cold” dynamic, according to a Rolling Stone report. Froseth shared informational posts on grooming methods following Vinberg’s comments.
“The women that I have spoken to and have met, I believe them, and I believe their stories, and I do think it’s important to not ignore it,” explains Froseth.
Froseth is also expected to star in Paul Schrader’s Oh Canada alongside Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi.
In the finale of The Buccaneers, Nan makes a hasty, yet judicious decision to marry the Duke in order to protect her sister Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse) from her abusive husband Lord James (Barney Fishwick). As the two seal their marriage, the song “Long Live (Taylor’s Version)” plays in the background. It’s a courageous and shocking moment for her character.
“I really lost the Nan that I’d first met and I wasn’t certain that she was going to make the right choice, if that is the right choice,” Froseth says, “but really proud of her for doing that and for connecting back to her original values and morals.”
Conchita (Alisha Boe) and Lord Richard (Josh Dylan) also face financial hardships and break away from the royal family, which to viewers may seem like a Meghan Markle and Prince Harry-style exit. To Jakeways, the parallels between the real royals were mostly a coincidence.
“There are lots of things about their relationship that are not the same as Harry and Meghan, but it would be disingenuous to suggest that we didn’t recognize that that was a similarity,” Jakeways says.
As the girls celebrate ahead of Conchita’s wedding in Episode One and embrace one another before Nan walks down the aisle in Episode Eight, three words remain the same. Just like Nan, Froseth has let go of her childlike desires to conform and found herself.
“She does lose herself throughout but ultimately she makes the right choice and brings everyone back together to save Jinny,” says Froseth. “So, it starts with the line, ‘We come first,’ and ends with, ‘We come first.'”
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