With today’s theatrical and demand release of “Unlocked” in the United States, a bunch of new press junket interviews with Noomi has been released. Also, for the French theatrical release of “What Happened to Monday”, interviews from the French press junket are online as well. Check out the new interviews, alongside a couple new interviews from the British press junket for “Unlocked” and a b-roll for “Monday”, in the video archive. Many thanks to Marika for the heads-up.
After two years of waiting, our question of what has happened to Monday has finally been answered, as Tommy Wirkola’s scifi action thriller is available for streaming on Netflix since Friday. There’s a lot to say about the movie, good things and bad things, but one thing is for sure – “Monday” has been worth the wait. Noomi delivers a true tour de force, being able to indeed pull of seven performances with seven different characters. The great special effects do her a great service by blending all sisters together effortlessly. After a couple of minutes you don’t think about how they have done and just enjoy the performances. Without spoiling the story, the film is much more violent than expected, unnecessarily vulgar throughout, loses its pace after the first half and picks it up right when it has to. The first thing I thought when the ending credits started rolling, is that I have to watch it again to see how good it really works and how it connects all the dots. So “Monday” is a definite recommendation. Screencaptures have been added to the photo gallery, and their amount is huge because Noomi is in almost every single frame of the film, and please be advised that the captures also feature massive spoilers – so if you haven’t seen it yet, make sure to watch it on Netflix to enjoy it fully. Have you seen it yet? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Today’s release of “What Happened to Monday?” and the recent promotion of “Bright” at the San Diego Comic-Con has put Noomi on the spot for the past days – and on the pages of Vanity Fair Italia, Empire Magazine and The Red Bulletin. You can view all latest added scans by checking the thumbnails below. Many thanks to Marinka for the heads-up! Very appreciated.
Photo Gallery – Magazine Scans – Empire (United Kingdom, September 2017)
Photo Gallery – Magazine Scans – Vanity Fair (Italy, August 2017)
Photo Gallery – Magazine Scans – The Red Bulletin (Mexico, September 2017)
Popsugar has posted a lengthy article for today’s Netflix premiere of “What Happened to Monday?”, including an interview with Noomi Rapace: The Swedish actress stars in the streaming network’s dystopian action flick, out Aug. 18, as identical septuplets named after each day of the week. All seven sisters have grown up living in hiding thanks to the government’s law restricting families to one child only due to overpopulation, so their grandfather (Willem Dafoe) allows them out of the house only on the day corresponding with their name. They’re able to maintain one public identity through adulthood, until a government agency led by the steely Glenn Close picks up on the scam. Monday doesn’t return home after her day out, and soon enough her sisters savagely work their way through a long line of agents (and end up getting picked off in gory fashion themselves) in an effort to save her.
[Tommy Wirkola] called me up and said, ‘So, Noomi, I have this project, I want you to read it. It’s actually seven brothers, but if you want to want to do it with me, because I can only imagine you doing this, I want to change it into women, to seven sisters.’ Then he sent me the script and I read it, and I called the next day saying, ‘OK. Absolutely, yes.’ But I was terrified,” she recalls. “It was like, ‘If this doesn’t work, it’s all on me.’ I stepped into this knowing that I had to do something I’ve never done before and no one’s done before, because it’s not seven clones. It’s not a person with multiple personalities. It’s actually seven different people.
Signing on to play a character who flings herself out of second story windows and chops off fingers is not an unusual choice for Rapace, who has steadily built her career around projects that allow the slight, 5’4″ star to fully embrace her physicality after a childhood spent practicing martial arts. “I don’t really go and chase [those roles],” Rapace tells me during a recent phone call. “I’m very drawn to physical parts because I like doing all of that and it’s always a fun ride, but it always needs to be coming out of a character and be character driven. When it’s just pure action, that doesn’t really do much for me. I like an action movie with real drama.” The complete article can be read here.
Netflix has released an action-packed clip from their upcoming sci-fi thriller What Happened to Monday. The story is set in a dystopian future where families are only allowed to have one child to help regulate the world’s population. One father breaks this law after he has identical septuplets. He decides that they all deserve to live, so he devises a way to keep them in hiding but they have to live a shared life outside of their home. Each of his seven daughters are named after a day of the week, and one day Monday doesn’t come home. This sets off a crazy and intense journey as Monday’s sisters embark on a mission to find her. If you haven’t seen the trailer yet, you should check it out here. The movie also stars Willem Dafoe and Glenn Close and it was directed by Tommy Wirkola (Dead Snow). “What Happened to Monday?” is set to be released on Netflix tomorrow.
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.
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.
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.
Netflix has launched the final American trailer for “What Happened to Monday?”, alongside its official synopsis: In a not so distant future, where overpopulation and famine have forced governments to undertake a drastic “One Child Policy,” seven identical sisters live a hide-and-seek existence pursued by the Child Allocation Bureau. The Bureau, directed by the fierce Nicolette Cayman (Glenn Close), enforces a strict family-planning agenda that the sisters outwit by taking turns assuming the identity of one person: Karen Settman (Noomi Rapace). Taught by their grandfather (Willem Dafoe) who raised and named them –Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday – each can go outside once a week as their common identity, but are only free to be themselves in the prison of their own apartment. That is until, one day, Monday does not come home… “What Happened To Monday” hits Netflix on August 18th.
On Tuesday, Noomi Rapace and director Tommy Wirkola have attended a screening for “What Happened to Monday” arranged by Netflix in West Hollywood. This marks the first promotional turn in the United States after a first promotion tour for the French release has taken place earlier this month. Pictures from the screening have been added to the photo gallery.
