Yesterday, Noomi was a guest on the ski slopes for the 13th edition of Les Arcs Film Festival in snowy Bourg-Saint-Maurice, France, to present “Lamb” as the festival’s opening night attraction. Pictures from the event have been added to the photo gallery. Edit: A lenghty interview with Noomi has been posted below and added to the video archive.
Photo Gallery – Public Appearances – 2021 – 13th Arcs Film Festival – Opening Ceremony
Video Archive – Public Appearances – 13th Arcs Film Festival Interview (2021)
In her second collaboration with director Tommy Wirkola after 2017’s “What Happened to Monday?”, Noomi Rapace is given “only” one character to play, but this one has all the rage. In “The Trip”, Rapace plays Lisa, a moderately unsuccesful actress, 2ho heads to a remote cabin with her husband Lars, a moderately successful tv producer, who has planned the trip to kill his wife during the weekend trip. Coincidentally, Lisa has planned just the same fate for her husband. Their mutual blood bath turns into a group affair when some unexpected outsiders, including three escaped convicts, join the fray. Tommy Wirkola’s trip is everything you expect (bloody, funny, outrageous) and then some. Clearly one of Noomi’s most entertaining films of the last couple of years. Screencaptures from the Blu-Ray as well as its making of featurette have been added to the photo gallery. Next week: An early Christmas surprise for you :-)
Photo Gallery – Career Photography – The Trip – Blu-Ray Screencaptures
Photo Gallery – Career Photography – The Trip – Making Of Screencaptures
Noomi’s upcoming film “You Won’t Be Alone” will celebrate its world-premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 23, 2022, before its theatrical release on January 28, 2022 in the United States.
In an isolated mountain village in 19th-century Macedonia, a young girl is taken from her mother and transformed into a witch by an ancient, shape-shifting spirit. Left to wander feral, the young witch beholds the natural world with curiosity and wonder. After inadvertently killing a villager and assuming her body, she continues to inhabit different people, living among the villagers for years, observing and mimicking their behavior until the ancient spirit returns, bringing them full circle.
The debut feature of Australian-Macedonian writer-director Goran Stolevski, You Won’t Be Alone is wonderfully unlike any witch film you’ve seen. Its striking artistry and aestheticism blends supernatural horror (there’s no shortage of blood and entrails) with poetic fable, yielding a sensory meditation on life that is unexpectedly emotional and profoundly humanistic. Even the malevolent ancient spirit, born of suffering and loneliness, is a contoured character. And the young witch (played by multiple actors, including Noomi Rapace, Alice Englert, Carloto Cotta, and Sara Klimoska) suggests a transcendent spirit who, across successive lives – woman, man, mother, child – experiences what it means to be human.
Photo Gallery – Career Photography – You Won’t Be Alone – Production Stills
On Wednesday and Thursday, Noomi Rapace and director Valdimar Jóhannsson participated in a comprehensive media tour in the United Kingdom to promote Friday’s theatrical release of “Lamb”. There were various screenings and Q&As for the film throughout London. Pictures from all events have been added to the photo gallery.
Then, Noomi participated in two separate press junkets for the film. Clips from both, as well as a clip from the Q&A at the British Film Institute have been added to the video archive. Check the list below for a complete list of updates. Enjoy.
Photo Gallery – Public Appearances – 2021 – “Lamb” London Gala Screening
Photo Gallery – Public Appearances – 2021 – “Lamb” Screening at Screen on the Green
Photo Gallery – Public Appearances – 2021 – “Lamb” Screening at British Film Institute
Photo Gallery – Public Appearances – 2021 – “Lamb” Screening hosted by CAA
Video Archive – Career Videos – Lamb – Press Junket 01 (United Kingdom)
Video Archive – Career Videos – Lamb – Press Junket 02 (United Kingdom)
Video Archive – Public Appearances – Lamb Screening at British Film Institute (2021)
Video Archive – Podcasts – Times Radio with Mariella Frostrup (2021)
Another fantastic interview with Noomi’s in yesterday’s i Newspaper: For a few years when she was growing up in Iceland, Noomi Rapace lived on a farm, but she was too young to get involved with any of the day-to-day labour. So when, on her first day on the set of her new film, Lamb, she had to drive a tractor and deliver a lamb, it was something of a baptism of fire. “I knew I could not f**k up,” she tells me over coffee in a London hotel. “But I didn’t have a lot of adrenaline. There was a strange calmness.” Still, her foray into midwifery left its mark. “The weirdest thing was the very specific smell. It just wouldn’t wash off. It stayed for a week or something.” The Icelandic film, directed by first-timer Valdimar Jóhannsson, was the break-out hit at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Rapace, 41, plays a woman caught between two brothers, who loosely resemble Cain and Abel: she’s married to one and had previously been involved with the other. It is not the only biblical element to the tale; her character is called Maria, after all. When the childless couple discover a newborn in their barn, they are so excited that they fail to notice there is something odd about it – namely that it is half-lamb, half-human. The complete interview can be read over at i News – here’s Noomi’s quote on the recently wrapped “Django”, which will span over ten episodes:
I wanted to take a break. I had a Skype call with the director and writers who wanted to create a role. Then Nicholas Pinnock texted me for a coffee and I took him to work out with me in a climbing class. As we were leaving, he tells another friend: ‘I’m off to Romania tomorrow and Noomi’s going to play my sister’. And I thought: ‘I haven’t said yes yet’. The character is the most beautiful, brutal villain. I dream about her. I told the writers this, and some of my dreams have become part of the script. I have accepted imperfections and allowed myself to feel sadness, vulnerability and weakness. That’s not weakness. I was raised in a way never to cry, never show weakness. So I became very tough. I don’t want to live like that. I don’t want to accept that way of living, and carrying myself, to bleed into my son’s life. I want him to be a human that has access to all emotions, where everything is allowed.
Noomi is featured in the recent international issue of The wrap Magazine, with an interview that can be read on their website as well: Noomi Rapace was sitting waiting for “the knock” on her trailer door, a sign that a mother sheep was ready to deliver a baby. She had just traveled hours to a small Icelandic village to film a movie about a hybrid lamb-human baby for six months and no money. And all her training didn’t prepare her for having to birth this little miracle on her first day of filming. “I was running down to the barn, and they were like, ‘The lamb is coming!’ OK, I’m just sticking my hands in here! I guess this is what we’re doing,” Rapace said. “It was the birth of the movie that kicked off everything, but from that point there was no return. I was just in it.” The emotional connection she formed in that moment carried through to her performance in Valdimar Jóhannsson’s “Lamb,” Iceland’s Oscar entry and a movie about coping with loss and how we go to extreme lengths to maintain a sense of normalcy. Rapace had been itching to return to art-house cinema and felt the “fragile” and “personal” story at its center was something she’d been waiting for “my entire life.” “I always need to bring it back to myself and find situations or periods in my life like an emotional mirror so I can dig into myself,” Rapace said. “I did go to places where it was really painful to be, of loss and heartbreak. How do you find your way back into life when you’re broke?” The complete interview can be read here.
In 2010’s “The Secrets we Keep”, Noomi Rapace – with a cigarette glued to her hand – plays a persecuted Romani with a traumatizing past, living an All-American life as a 1950’s housewife, when she suddenly sees the man she believes killed her sister during World War II. She kidnaps him, hides him in the family basement and tries to get a confession out of him. All the while, she cannot even convince her husband that two strangers who met at the end of the world end up in the same little town in America. “The Secrets We Keep” plays out like a four-person-play in a claustrophobic basement, but it can’t keep the pace and suspense the story needs. Much like last week’s “Angel of Mine”, the story’s premise allows only two ways to end, so there’s not much of a surprise to its climax. Still, it’s a good watch, so make sure to look out for it on your streaming device. Screencaptures from the Blu-Ray have been added to the photo gallery. Next Sunday will bring us yet another basement story with Tommy Wirkola’s “The Trip”.
Photo Gallery – Career Photography – The Secrets We Keep – Blu-Ray Screencaptures
On Monday, Noomi was among the many prominent guests to grace the red carpet of the 2021 Fashion Awards in London. Lots of pictures from the event have been added to the photo gallery.
Photo Gallery – Public Appearances – 2021 – The 2021 Fashion Awards
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.
“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.