Nepo curse or gift? The pros and cons of being Bjork’s daughter

Isadora Bjarkardottir Barney knew she wanted to act by the time she was 10, when she started taking extra classes in theatre at her private school in New York. “And from there it just flew.” In her last year at school, she jumped at the opportunity to work with Robert Eggers, determined to somehow combine filming with her final exams.

At 22, she has just played her first lead role in Asthildur Kjartansdottir’s The Mountain, a delicate story of family grief in which she plays a teenage girl trying to manage her father’s disintegration. She also sings, her voice alternately sawing and soaring in songs she devised with her fellow cast members.

None of this is too surprising, given that Isadora – or Doa, as she is generally known – is the only daughter of Icelandic singer, sometime actor and all-round adventurer Bjork and Matthew Barney, doyen of New York’s avant-garde. After their acrimonious split back in 2013, she spent half of each year studying in New York and half in Reykjavik, where she still swaps between jobs as they come up: working in a cool record shop, on film crews or in music production. That’s the Icelandic way. I’m only surprised she hasn’t squeezed in a season in the fish factories.

Anna (Isadora Bjarkardottir Barney) is struggling with the loss of her mother in The Mountain. 

When we speak, she says she has just wrapped a local festival, producing grassroots Icelandic artists. “Young people who don’t have the funds to do it the right way – so we have to do it the fun way.” She chuckles and snuffles: the Icelandic farmers are all cutting this year’s hay crop. She tells me this in a slow American drawl; it is only when she uses an Icelandic name that her voice is suddenly crisp. She feels herself shift between cultures, she says, when she speaks.

“My Icelandic side is different from my American one; like anyone who is bicultural,” she says. “There is a reason why certain languages develop in certain places. It’s like it’s cold, so whatever you’re feeling, just spit it out because it’s too cold to stand out here and chew the fat! I’m maybe also more direct in Icelandic, more to the point. This interview would be a lot shorter if I were speaking Icelandic!”

In a crisis of sudden bereavement, however, the family in The Mountain find it difficult to say anything at all. Barney plays Anna, a young musician whose band is starting to get the gigs and online plays that suggest success is around the corner. Her father Atli (Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson), an electrician, was part of a seminal punk band before she was born; her mother Maria (Solveig Gudmundsdottir) is a science teacher and passionate astronomer who believes she has just made a discovery: a comet over Iceland.

To Maria’s disappointment, neither Atli nor Anna can muster any interest in her comet. When she goes to the family’s mountain cabin to observe it, they find reasons to stay at home. So she goes alone, walks on the lava fields at night, falls, dies. Atli blames himself. Anna is torn between grief and getting on with a life in which there are both too many burdens and too many choices. Crucially, she realises she is pregnant.

Isadora Bjarkardottir Barney and Bjorn Hlynur Haraldsson in The Mountain.

What drew her to the story, says Barney, was the way the character was pulled in so many directions. “I think Anna’s teetering carefully on multiple precipices,” she says. “There is that sense of helplessness in her situation, which is something we all sometimes want to succumb to; she’s stepping in and out of that, embarking on journeys of grief, of adulthood, of both motherhood and losing a mother, of being a daughter in this new way, of being an artist. It’s a lot of big firsts that are being opened up to her.”

As someone who has also negotiated numerous possible life routes already, she surely identified. “It’s a relatable thing, I think, to anyone,” she counters. “Although it did definitely come at a time when I was unsure about a lot of things and saying yes, just going for it, was the only thing I could hold on to. There isn’t a career path that’s pre-written if you’re committed to a life in the arts so yes, maybe it was relatable. It’s never completely clear if she’s making the right decision. And that’s comforting, because even if you are making the right decision, it doesn’t always feel that way.”

The role seems to fit Barney so well that it comes as a surprise to learn she was cast as a last-minute replacement. In Eggers’ extraordinary drama The Northman, a muddy, bloody medieval saga starring Nicole Kidman and Alexander Skarsgard, she played a slave called Melkorka who also sang, Viking style. Eggers wrote the script with Icelandic poet Sjon. Bjork, friend of both, had introduced them; after agreeing to play a cameo as a witch, she then asked if her daughter could audition as Melkorka. Eggers was adamant she was the best person for the role, but she wasn’t there by chance.

The part of Anna, however, came through the back door. Barney had worked in production on a television series with the first assistant director on The Mountain, who vaguely recalled that this young casting director had done a bit of acting. “I went over for coffee and we did some scenes and I brought some demos for music and we just flew from there. It felt like a dream, really. I was given a lot of room to play once we got started, but it kind of came out of nowhere: it was wild.”

Barney is now studying performance at Central Saint Martins in London. She finished the film before starting the course, but feels it was also an education. “I definitely felt on set that ‘wow, this is really forming me as a collaborator’. The first few weeks I was maybe a little shy, kind of nodding my head and saying ‘sure, I’ll stand here and say that’.” Haraldsson encouraged her to take the character into her own hands. “Eventually, I started to take up more space.”

Isadora Bjarkardottir Barney in New York with her mother, Bjork, in 2012.Credit: Getty Images

There is no doubt that being the child of Bjork and Barney is quite a launching pad for a young artist – and not only because she has been surrounded by creative thinkers all her life. She also has two top-calibre professional advisers. “I have the benefit of their direct support as experienced veterans in their fields, which I am so, so lucky to have,” she says. “They’re the first people I come to, if I have an idea for a script or a project. They have so much guidance to offer.

“But then there is the other kind of benefit, that disguises itself as a benefit but doesn’t really serve you, which is nepotism. Financially, sure, it can get you super far, but in terms of one’s own personal journey – uncovering how I see the world, how I relate to it and how I’d like to share that with people as an artist – it doesn’t help you very much.”

People have pre-conceived ideas about her, based on what they think they know about her family. “I hope I don’t sound bitter,” she adds hastily. “Because it’s such a gift. I just mean that it’s a challenge discerning what’s what.” She snuffles and laughs again. “But you get pretty good at it, eventually.”

The Mountain is part of the Scandinavian Film Festival, Melbourne until August 3, Sydney until August 10 and Brisbane until August 14. https://scandinavianfilmfestival.com/