Noomi Rapace takes on a punk persona to play Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. The piercings in the film are real, but not the tattoos, says the actress.
Knut Koivisto
You can’t read her p-p-p-poker face — and don’t try figuring out her tattoo, either.
As Lisbeth Salander, the genius sociopath computer hacker of Sweden’s phenomenal Millennium thriller trilogy of novels by the late Stieg Larsson, Noomi Rapace is like a cyberpunk Lady Gaga, minus the lust for fame.
Her nose, eyebrow, lips and ears are covered with piercings. A shock of black hair covers nearly half her face and a ring of spikes adorns her neck. Dressed all in black, mostly leather, she walks with her head down, avoiding eye contact — but not sexual contact. Salander is a raging bisexual, and as far as she’s concerned, gender is irrelevant and foreplay is for wimps.
She’s certainly making a statement, but she’s not looking for attention, conversation or cuddles.
Then there’s her full-back body painting, a mysterious icon that looks as if it were created in Satan’s own needle den.
It’s the main image of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the book and now movie (opening April 2) that introduced Lisbeth Salander to the world, creating a franchise that rivals Twilight and The Da Vinci Code for blockbuster sales and fan devotion.
The book has sold 30 million copies worldwide in 44 languages, more than 350,000 copies in Canada. The film, the first of three, has already grossed $100 million (U.S.). The other two volumes and films (they work fast in Sweden) are also leaping off store shelves and silver screens. North Americans are playing catch-up.
Everything about Salander only gets weirder, as does the Larsson series through the remaining volumes of the Millennium trilogy, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest.
How much of this is the punk, and how much is the real Rapace? It’s a little bit of both, actually. The self-taught Swedish actress, who successfully fought all comers to grab one of the hottest casting assignments of the 21st century, admits to having both an aggressive and a “girly” side to her.
Her first name is pronounced “know-me,” but that’s hard to do.
“The piercings were real, but not the tattoos!” a laughing Rapace, 30, said from London, one of many promotional tour stops advancing the global release of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.
“When I was 14 or 15, I had many interesting piercings and I was some kind of punk rocker. And I have always been on my own. I moved from my mother’s and my stepfather’s when I was 15 and have been taking care of myself since I was young. So I think that I’m also a survivor and I’m pretty stubborn.”
She’s used to seeing herself in many lights. She was born in Iceland to a showbiz family: mother Nina Norén is a Swedish actress; father Rogelio Durán was a Spanish flamenco singer. Her mother remarried and moved with her daughter to Sweden, where Rapace still resides, living with her actor husband Ola Rapace and their young son. But home these days is wherever Rapace lays her spikes.
“I feel like I’m kind of a gypsy, Baohemian I-don’t-know-what!” she said.
“I’ve been travelling and I’ve always been moving around. I’ve always felt like an outsider in Sweden, actually. I haven’t really found ‘home’ yet. I’m half-Spanish, but I don’t speak it. I speak a bit of Danish, a bit of Norwegian and, of course, Swedish, Icelandic and English. I’m something in between everything.”
Rapace began acting at age 7 after taking a non-speaking role in a Swedish film. Her work since then has been mostly on stage or TV, but her award-winning performance as a downward-spiralling teen mom in the harrowing 2007 Danish film Daisy Diamond added “movie star” to her many accolades.
By the time Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev began casting for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the book, published in 2005 after Larsson’s death from a heart attack a year earlier, was already a white-hot commodity. The fictional Salander, meanwhile, had become an instant pop icon.
She’s a world-class computer hacker whose intense curiosity in a 40-year-old missing-girl mystery on a family-run island leads her to reluctantly team with disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist in the film) to hunt for the truth. A pitch-black world of violence, deceit and cult murder awaits them.
Rapace is well known across Scandinavia — she gets stopped in the streets for autographs — but notoriety alone wasn’t enough to land the role of Salander, which was worth its weight in gold piercings to every ambitious young female thespian.
Even though she really wanted the gig, there was a part of her that resisted the idea.
“I read the books a couple of years before the shoot,” Rapace recalled.
“Then I read in the paper that they were going to make a film out of the first one. I was really upset, really angry and really sad because I loved this book. I had done some art-house films and a lot of theatre but I didn’t think they’d consider me because they would judge me to be too girly or too feminine.”
She’s also several inches taller than the 4-foot-11 that Salander is described as in the book.
“I’m a bit taller and a bit heavier, but in Sweden, I’m a very short person,” Rapace said, laughing. “So everyone sees me as a very short person, anyway.
“I knew I could change into her, but I didn’t think they could imagine how I would be able to transform myself. So I was very surprised when they called me and wanted me to come in and do an interview.”
Rapace would eventually chop off much of her long hair, get piercings and take boxing lessons to toughen herself up for the role. But first she had to convince Oplev that she was right for the gig. That was really tough, since she’s allergic to auditions.
“I hate to go to auditions. I hate trying to convince people to choose me. I don’t like that part of my job. When I met Niels, the director, I said to him, ‘We have to work. I don’t want to show myself and try to convince you. We have to work with the scenes and pretend that we are actually going to do the film and I will try to find Lisbeth now, immediately.’”
She certainly made an impression on him, as Oplev recalled in the film’s production notes.
“Lisbeth Salander is possibly the character in modern Scandinavian drama with the most expectations attached, and I can’t believe the luck we have had in finding Noomi Rapace for this part,” Oplev said.
“Noomi has transformed herself into her character to a chilling perfection. Her performance as Lisbeth is outstanding.”
He’s not the only one saying so. Rapace won Best Actress awards at two Scandinavian festivals last year for her portrayal of Salander, and she was nominated in the same category for the European Film Awards.
What is it, though, that made her want to play Salander, a character of such extremes? She commits acts of violence but she’s also the victim of horrific brutality.
“I like the fact that she’s a fighter. She’s a survivor. She doesn’t accept being a victim. She always finds a way to be the one who’s acting, who’s doing things: she’s trying to get control over her life. Again and again and again. She’s struggling and she’s very stubborn and she’s trying to fight life, and I like that. I think that it’s very beautiful that she never feels sorry for herself.”
Rapace modelled her character on Anne Parillaud’s title character in La Femme Nikita, the 1990 Luc Besson movie about a convicted felon who becomes a spy-assassin. Oplev asked her to see the film prior to making The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but she didn’t need the prompting.
“I’d seen it many times before. It was one of my favourite films, actually. I also love True Romance, with Patricia Arquette and Christian Slater. I love the scene when Patricia is fighting against James Gandolfini. It’s a classic, and I’ve probably seen the film 10 times.
“But it was extremely important for me to find my own personal Lisbeth, so I had to clear my mind and clear my brain and start all over from zero.”
She’s grateful for the career boost, and not the least bit troubled that the 20-something Salander is referred to as a “girl” rather than a woman in the title of all three films. It’s not very liberated for such a strong female character. The original Swedish title of the book was Men Who Hate Women.
“Sometimes she’s like a dream-girl, like a fantasy for a middle-aged man,” Rapace mused.
“So it doesn’t surprise me that the title is The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire. I tried to give her life and I tried to humanize her and let her be like a whole human being because in the book she’s sometimes like something somebody has dreamt up. She’s a bit unreal and cartoonish, like a manga action heroine sometimes.”
In her transformation into Salander, Rapace drew the line at getting the dragon tattoo permanently affixed. That kind of thing is so rare in Sweden, they had to import the image from the U.S.
She can’t understand why Angelina Jolie — who will likely be considered for the eventual English-language remake — would want to cover herself with permanent markings.
“How does she do that, if she’s playing somebody from the Second World War? Do they cover it? I once worked with a male actor who had many tattoos, it was a huge problem. It was so difficult to cover them.
“No, I must be a chameleon. I have to change the way I look for different characters, so I can’t tattoo myself.”
She’s equally as firm about her reluctance to play Salander again. She’s now done the role three times — the other two movies have already been released in Scandinavia — and there is serious talk of a Hollywood version. Count her out for that, even though Penélope Cruz proved that language is no deterrent: Cruz once played the same character in the Spanish film Abre los ojos and later in the English remake Vanilla Sky.
“I think it would be pretty cynical if I did the American remake. It would only be trying to better my career in the U.S. and I don’t want to go in that direction. I think it’s much more interesting to meet new people and go into new projects and not be holding onto things.”
The screenplay Rapace is currently reading, for a part that she will likely take, is almost the polar opposite of Dragon Tattoo and Salander.
“It’s a girly role and it’s very far away from Lisbeth, so we’ll see. It takes place during the Second World War.”
So she doesn’t feel permanently attached to Lisbeth Salander, the character who made her a global star?
“No! I tried to give her my life, but I don’t own her.”
Salander would undoubtedly appreciate such unsentimental sentiments.
