The Australian has a nice article on Noomi Rapace, just in time for the down under release of “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest”. An excerpt follows below. The complete article can be read here. On screen it is clear how keenly Noomi Rapace inhabited the role of Lisbeth Salander in the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. Her bracing, brooding performance in the first film, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, propelled the unknown Swedish actress out of a steady career in Scandinavia into the global spotlight and was enough to convince Guy Ritchie and Ridley Scott to cast her, respectively, as the lead in the coming Sherlock Holmes sequel and the Alien prequel, Prometheus. US critic Roger Ebert was moved to write that Rapace’s Lisbeth “is as compelling as any movie character in recent memory”. She wasn’t always such. Larsson’s three novels, published posthumously, focused on campaigning journalist Mikael Blomkvist as much as the psychologically damaged hacker Lisbeth. And when filming began neither was anticipated to capture the world’s imagination. They were solid characters, yes, but not superstars.
