Welcome to Noomi Rapace Online, your premiere web resource on the Swedish actress. Best known for her performances as Lisbeth Salander in the original "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" film trilogy, "Prometheus" and the recent Indie hit "Lamb", Noomi Rapace has emerged as one of the most exciting European actresses of this decade. This unofficial fansite provides you with all latest news, photos, editorials and video clips on her past and present work.  Enjoy your stay and check back soon.
Dec
02
2021

Another great article and interview can be found in today’s The Guardian: Noomi Rapace – the original Lisbeth Salander, AKA The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – is sitting in the hotel bar with her sunglasses on top of her head. They disappear at some point during our conversation, though I don’t see them go. I do notice, however, when her black jacket, which has been draped around her shoulders, falls to the floor while she is flapping her arms pretending to be an eagle. This happens shortly after she has told me how she once wore a strap-on dildo in public. She really is a lot of fun and quite naughty. We were due to meet in a windowless room upstairs but she wanted a window. “They’d put us in a little prison cell,” she huffs, now looking out on to the back streets of London’s Mayfair. “I was like, ‘I can’t be stuck in there!’ It’s all about flows and energies.” The double espresso she asked for when she first got here has yet to arrive, so she orders another from a passing staff member, who brings it in a flash. Rapace, who is 41, does a quick inventory: “Window. Coffee. Ryan. Perfect.” Then her original order arrives. She looks up at her server in astonishment. “Is this ours? I love your lipstick, by the way, it’s really pretty.” She turns to me. “Do you want this? Let’s have it.” The next time I look down, both cups are empty. This is all worlds away from the forceful minimalism she brings to the unsettling new indie thriller Lamb. She plays Maria, who lives with her husband on a farm in the Icelandic countryside. It’s just the two of them, their sensible knitwear, their animals, and the unspoken pain of the past. “It’s like a family drama,” she says. “But with one obstacle that is a bit strange.” That’s putting it mildly. When a sheep on the farm gives birth to a half-human, half-lamb hybrid, the couple name her Ada, rock her like a baby, and adopt her as their own. Meanwhile, Ada’s birth mother stands outside, bleating sinisterly, refusing to budge. The complete interview can be read over at The Guardian.

Dec
02
2021

“Lamb” will be released in the United Kingdom on December 10, and a first string of promotional interviews with Noomi are being released as we speak. Here’s a great interview with NME: Noomi Rapace is never one to conform to Hollywood’s notion of what a leading woman should look like. From her scorching international breakthrough in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, the first of a violent, vengeful trilogy, to headlining Ridley Scott’s Alien prequel Prometheus, and now with her new horror Lamb, the 41-year-old Swedish actor has challenged femininity by opting for robust, often radical roles, over mainstream ideals. “I’ve always seen myself as a human rather than a woman,” she tells NME via video-call from a whitewashed, empty-looking studio in central London. “I’ve always felt alienated when they want to put me in a box, or when people expect me to behave a certain way just because my gender is female.” In Lamb, a surreal Icelandic folk tale which Rapace describes as “a beautiful, strange adventure”, she plays María, a grieving mother who finds new joy in life when Ada, a strange but innocent sheep-human hybrid, is born on the farm that she runs with her husband. For the actor, taking the role was instinctual, and not just because she herself had grown up on a farm in her native Sweden. “I felt like I didn’t have a choice, like my body and my mind and my heart had been waiting for this,” she says. “Maria found me, and I got lost in her.” The complete interview can be read over at NME.

Nov
26
2021

Another fantastic interview with Valdimar Johannsson and Noomi Rapace on the making of “Lamb”, courtesy Screen Daily. Waiting for a sheep to give birth straight into the hands of lead actress Noomi Rapace was just one of the challenges of making Lamb, Icelandic filmmaker Valdimar Johannsson’s debut feature, which created a stir in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard and has become the highest-grossing Icelandic film released in US cinemas (thanks to A24). The story follows an Icelandic couple (Rapace and Hilmir Snaer Gudnason) living on a remote farm who adopt a mysterious newborn, not quite sheep, not quite human, naming it Ada. Known for her booming international career with roles in the Swedish adaptation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (and its two sequels), The Drop, Child 44 and Amazon series Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Rapace was born in Sweden but grew up in Iceland. Lamb gave her a chance to return to those roots. Co-scripted by Johannsson with Icelandic screenwriter and novelist Sjon, Lamb is an Iceland-Sweden-Poland co-production, produced by Hronn Kristinsdottir and Sara Nassim at Go To Sheep alongside Piodor Gustafsson and Erik Rydell at Black Spark Prod, and Klaudia Smieja-Rostworowska and Jan Naszewski at Madants. Naszew­ski’s New Europe Film Sales handles international sales. The full interview can be read here.

I grew up on a farm, [with] life and death present all the time. The circle of life is right there in front of you… and the Icelandic folklore is kind of baked into everything. My grandmother would say, “We can’t ride across this hill because we don’t want to upset the elves.” It was very much a part of life and not seen as something strange.

Jan
13
2018

Happy New Year everybody! I completely missed that Noomi has attended the Astrid Andersen runway at London Fashion Week’s Men last week. Many thanks to Marinka for bringing it to my attention. Also, there’s a new interview with Noomi in the Indian edition of The Telegraph and a review page on “Bright” in the February issue of Empire Magazine.

Dec
16
2017

Article and pictures courtesy Vogue and Astrid Andersen: When an interview ends with you strapped into Noomi Rapace’s new top-of-the-line Audi as she bounces behind the wheel to top-volume Cardi B, then accelerates up Ladbroke Grove faster than anything out of North Korea, well, it’s been an awesome assignment. And when Vogue was invited to lunch with the Swedish-born actress (the original Lisbeth Salander!) and the Danish-born designer Astrid Andersen, that’s exactly how things ended up. But before we hit the road—Andersen and Rapace up front, singing and whooping as we went full throttle, me in the back, trying not to toss my salad—there was much to discuss. Royal College of Art–trained Andersen founded her menswear label in 2010, and last year started showing womenswear, too. She and Rapace didn’t meet all that long ago, but have since become firm friends. So for Spring 2018, Rapace volunteered to model Andersen’s collection (the women’s, with a sprinkling of men’s) in a shoot masterminded at the actress’s London house. That seemed like a perfect reason to meet, eat, and listen in on these two besties discussing friendship, clothes, first boyfriends, and plenty more besides. What follows is an edited record of a conversation in which, just like that hair-raising drive afterward, Vogue was very much in the back seat.

If you do something that you’re forced into, or you’re eye candy for someone, or you dress for someone else and you don’t feel comfortable, well, you don’t feel empowered and you don’t feel free. If you can’t dance in it, you can’t move in it, you can’t feel your energy and your charisma flowing, that is wrong. But if you wear something that you can move in and that makes you grow, you can come into any room and be like: Boom, here I am! You know, I never thought I would be comfortable in some places. I come from a farm and I come from no money. I didn’t even speak English seven and a half years ago. So I have to go on my intuition all the time. And I think that Astrid is very much the same; you have to go on your gut feeling.

Nov
24
2017

There’s no shortage of upcoming magazine appearances, lucky us, which includes two fantastic new editorials for Flaunt Magazine (December issue) and Styleby Magazine (Sweden, Winter 2017/2018 issue). Outtakes from both photoshoots have been added to the photo gallery.


Photo Gallery – Editorial Photography – 2017 – Session 16
Photo Gallery – Editorial Photography – 2017 – Session 17

Oct
15
2017

10 Magazine has posted its interview with Noomi Rapace on their website, so make sure to head over and read it: I meet her at the South Kensington Club, where she is a member, mostly to use the gym upstairs. If you put her name into Google Images, two of the top five suggested searches are “Noomi Rapace abs” and “Noomi Rapace muscles”. She practises Thai kickboxing and trains with her boyfriend. Today, her hair is peroxide blonde. Rapace’s presence commands attention. People in the club know who she is – a few say hello – but if they didn’t, there’s something in her demeanour that makes you aware she is there. Rapace says that people in London don’t recognise her, but I imagine they know she is someone, they just might not know who. Her face is angular but still feminine, which allows her to slide between the androgynous and the sexual – a shift that many directors demand of her. So you may be forgiven that she would be guarded – a reluctant interviewee, lost in preparations for whatever comes next. But she’s not. “People think I’m very serious and I’m very dark because of the roles I play – I’m not,” she says. It’s a statement delivered with – as many things she says are – a husky giggle. She tells me her favourite word is boom. “I say it alllllll the time,” she says. So much so that the word is written out in diamonds on a ring on her finger and also hangs from an earring. Both are custom made. She got the same earring made for her close friend Marilyn Manson. His is in silver.

Aug
14
2017

The third interview comes from am New York, including her view on the constant shift between theatrical releases and direct on-demand releases (as seen with “What Happened to Monday?” and the upcoming “Bright”): In the dystopian Netflix film “What Happened to Monday,” out Aug. 18, Swedish actress Noomi Rapace has the arduous task of playing seven sisters. The siblings, all named after days of the week, have to assume the identity of one person in order to survive in a society plagued by overpopulation. Things spiral out of control when one sister goes rogue. Rapace spoke with amNewYork about the challenges of playing seven different characters.

What do you make of the industry’s shift toward streaming platforms?
It’s changing and it’s happening. We can’t really fight it. If you look at the music industry, a lot of my friends are musicians and it hit them before it hit us. I embrace change. It’s quite amazing that people from all over the world will be able to see my film at the same time. Though some movies deserve a big screen and to be theatrically released. We need to work and find a balance between that but we have to make the best out of it. It’s all for the love of film.

Once again, the complete interview with Noomi Rapace can be read here.

Aug
14
2017

Today’s second interview that deserves a special mention comes from the Columbus Dispatcher. Already popular in her native Sweden, Noomi Rapace rose to international fame in 2009 via her intense performances as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film adaptations of Stieg Larsson’s ″The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.″ That same year, she went on to star in ″The Girl Who Played With Fire″ and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.” She lost out to Rooney Mara when the American version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo″ was made in 2011, acknowledding then that she was nervous about the prospect of going to Hollywood. She wasn’t even sure that she wanted to work in the United States, she said. Six years later, Rapace seems far less nervous. She has a string of American films to her credit, including hits such as Guy Ritchie’s ″Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows″ (2011) and Ridley Scott’s ″Prometheus″ (2012) as well as the indie productions ″The Drop″ (2015), ″Child 44″⁣ (2015) and ″⁣Rupture″⁣ (2016). She lives in England now and works frequently.

It’s gone really well. I realize that it’s not that different from what I was doing in Sweden. I think my idea of Hollywood was that I was not going to be working with real filmmakers, with proper artists, and I’ve realized that it’s actually all a mix. On the biggest productions in Hollywood today, there are big, artistic, stately, artsy directors. I thought it was going to be very different from what I was used to and how I was used to working, but it feels like the film industry in Hollywood – and in other countries I’ve worked in, too – is closer to what I wanted to do than I first expected.

Back then, the multilingual Rapace still struggled with English. During an interview on behalf of ″Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,″ she continually apologized and asked, ″Is this the right word?″ Her English nowadays is essentially flawless. ″I almost forgot about that because I moved to London and I’ve been in London maybe for four years now,″ Rapace said. ″My family lives with me here, and we speak English at home. So it’s like, my sister’s boyfriend, my sister, me and my son — we all speak English.” The complete interview can be read here.

Aug
13
2017

Articles and interviews to promote the August 18 release of “What Happened to Monday?” are coming in. In the first, Noomi Rapace talks to Looper: Shooting took nearly five months, with Rapace called to set almost every day. Most of the time, she was acting by herself, using a green screen with tennis balls or crosses and listening to her own pre-recorded dialogue in an earpiece. Sometimes, they used doubles, with Rapace showing them exactly how she had acted out the scene when she had been the other character. “Let’s say I’m doing a scene with Saturday and I’m Monday, and then I have to kind of plan what I’m gonna do as Saturday before I’ve done it and then I have to show the double girl how to move, and how to sit, and what line she will reach for the glass, because if we already established it with her I need to fix it later on when I was playing Saturday,” she explained. Still, despite the tough shoot, Rapace says she was proud of the project. “I love a challenge, and this was the hardest thing I could ever imagine,” she said, adding that she could feel a connection with her characters because they were all, like many of her past roles, “women fighting in a man’s world.” The complete article can be read here.