The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo star on playing an astronaut, the significance of her surname and the time Orlando Bloom broke her nose
Born Noomi Norén, the 44-year-old Swedish actor Noomi Rapace left home aged 15 to study acting in Stockholm. She broke through globally in 2009 when she starred in the film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestselling novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. She has since appeared in films including Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, Ridley Scott’s 2012 Alien prequel Prometheus and the Icelandic folk horror Lamb. Rapace can currently be seen in Constellation, an eight-part Apple TV+ thriller in which she plays an astronaut, Jo Ericsson, who returns to Earth after a disaster in space to find parts of her life and her family subtly upturned. Rapace lives between London and Lisbon and has a 21-year-old son.
In Constellation, you’re often not sure, as a viewer, whether what you’re watching is real or not. How would you describe the show?
It’s all real… some sort of real. And that’s what Jo is trying to figure out: has she lost her mind? Is she psychotic? Is it a huge conspiracy? That’s what is so brilliant about Peter Harness’s writing: he doesn’t feed us easy solutions or truths. It feels like looking into a broken mirror. And I like watching films and shows that have that complexity, because it doesn’t treat me like I’m stupid.
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