Kristine Froseth shows up to the Elite Daily office alone. An actor arriving for a photoshoot without at least one publicist or assistant on hand is so unheard of that I second-guess whether the 5-foot-7-inch blonde, wearing a shimmery, purple turtleneck and purple flares to match, is in fact the Looking for Alaska star. But it is Froseth, the 23-year-old who’s been racking up roles in some of the buzziest projects on streaming TV.

The nonchalant way Froseth travels is a product of her Norwegian upbringing, she says. She bounced between Norway and the United States throughout her childhood, and was struck by the discovery that the other kids she knew in New Jersey had controlling “helicopter parents.”

“I vividly remember how much freedom you have as a kid in Norway, and how independent you are compared to [kids in the U.S.],” she tells me. “I would always just roam around by myself.”

Froseth moves around the set unselfconsciously and, when Arizona Zervas’ “Roxanne” plays, breaks into a groovy dance. “Are you a model?” someone asks, and she laughs. Yes, Froseth is a model. Or she was, before she switched to acting full-time. As a teenager, she was scouted at a mall in Oslo, Norway, and she moved to New York a few months later. She landed gigs with major brands like H&M and Armani, but by 2015, she decided to focus mainly on acting.

She yearned for a creative outlet, which she wasn’t finding on modeling jobs. “There was a lot of creative energy around me, but I wasn’t necessarily able to be a part of that as much as I am now. Now, I can be a part of building a character,” Froseth says. “When you’re on set and so present with each other and whoever you’re working with, and you sort of get swept away — that’s so magical to me.”

That’s not to say that her transition from modeling to acting was smooth. She’s terrified of disappointing her audience, which she says made her feel especially connected to Alaska Young, the character she plays in Hulu’s adaptation of John Green’s first novel, Looking for Alaska, and Veronica, her character in the Netflix film Sierra Burgess Is a Loser.

“[Neither of the characters] trust themselves enough to be who they really are, so they keep up this very consistent front to protect themselves, because if people want to judge them, then they’ll judge that. They won’t actually judge them,” she explains. Having moved around so much as a kid, Froseth says she understood why the characters she played would want to put up walls. And it’s hard to blame Froseth for keeping her own guard up. Looking for Alaska, which centers around a mysterious death at a boarding school, may not be as well-known as Green’s other books, The Fault in Our Stars or Paper Towns, but as his first, it has a particularly passionate cult following. News that the novel would become a streaming show was immediately followed by a barrage of chatter from fans. They “were very vocal about who they wanted Alaska to be… and what energy she was supposed to [have],” Froseth says.

Full interview: elitedaily.com