As Maja in new film The Secrets We Keep, Noomi Rapace reprises some of her Lisbeth Salander edge. By Russell Baillie.
It's a little over a decade since Noomi Rapace's international breakthrough as Lisbeth Salander, the computer-hacker cyber-goth avenger in the three Swedish films made from Stieg Larsson's Millennium series.
In the time since, there's been a Hollywood remake of the first story, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and an adaptation of the fourth – not written by Larsson, who died in 2004 – The Girl in the Spider's Web. But the Lisbeths in those bigger, slicker films – Rooney Mara and Claire Foy – couldn't match the intensity of Rapace in the role.
Without Salander, she says, she's not sure where she would be now. "Maybe I would be travelling on a road trip in New Zealand," she says, laughing, down the line from Norway, where she's on a shoot. "So I'm pretty sure I would have been out of Sweden, but I guess my life would have looked quite different."
Post-Millennium, she certainly hit the ground running. She went into space with Alien prequel Prometheus, played a gypsy fortune teller to Sherlock Holmes in A Game of Shadows and starred in many thrillers of various types – erotic, action, mystery, crime, spy.
Her latest, The Secrets We Keep, adds another thriller subcategory – psychological – but it's different for other reasons. For one thing, it's the product of Rapace's increasing role as a producer to create projects for herself.
"I've been very aware that I need to create my own life and follow my own heart and not wait for others … that's also a part of me producing now and being in charge of my own journey.
"This film is truly personal to me and something that I put a lot of heart and blood and tears into."
She put the film together with director Yuval Adler and co-star Joel Kinnaman, another Swedish actor who has made his mark further afield.
Rapace's Maja is a 1950s Midwest housewife, whose US Army doctor husband brought her home from war-torn Europe. One day she recognises a man (Kinnaman) who she thinks was a German soldier who committed atrocities against her and other female Romani captives. Maja kidnaps and holds him hostage in her basement, hoping to make him confess while trying to convince her husband it's the right thing to do.
Her character's actions may well get the Salander stamp of approval.
"I would say that there actually is a parallel. I felt that Maja and Lisbeth have a little bit of the same big bleeding, pounding heart inside, but they've created this hard surface of protection and having to deal with things alone because they can't trust anyone.
"When I go and knock Joel out and put him in the trunk of my car, that is a bit Lisbeth. They definitely could have been sisters in a different time."
Quite a bit of the movie, which was shot in April, takes place in that basement, so it is just the thing for those of us missing the claustrophobia of lockdown.
"Yeah, it's Covid-friendly, as we say," she says with a laugh. "I love those intimate films where you can investigate a character and a relationship in depth and really go into the deepest, crucial moments between them. This was such an acting piece in that sense.
"Both me and Joel were drowning in that basement … as actors, we were slowly sinking together."
The initial script had the Maja character and her husband as Jewish concentration-camp survivors. It was Israeli film-maker Adler who suggested the change to Romani as he didn't want to make a Holocaust film and Rapace's background – her Spanish flamenco musician father had gypsy ancestry – made it a good fit. "We started doing research on how the Romani people were treated and what happened to them during World War II and it was like, wow, we just opened a door to a very dark past," she says.
"It made her a double outsider, not just a war victim but also that she has that."
With Sweden's neutral stance, the war doesn't figure large in Rapace's family history, she says, although she finds it upsetting that a grandfather she never knew was a car dealer who did business with the Nazis. In her teenage years, she remembers being on demonstrations and getting into violent clashes with far-right-wingers and the police.
"So that whole rebellious side of me has always been very strong."
The film has been compared to Roman Polanski's 1994 Death and the Maiden, in which Sigourney Weaver tries to exact the truth from Ben Kingsley, whom she has identified as her captor from years ago.
"I love that film and we have similarities, but we wanted to move it away from that one and more work with the uncertainty of Maja's broken memories, rather than her being 100 per cent convinced. It takes the audience on a slightly different journey because you never really know."
Weaver was, of course, Ripley in Ridley Scott's Alien and Rapace was the heroine of his return to space in Prometheus – so is she just following in the veteran star's footsteps?
"Yes, I am. 'What is Sigourney doing next? Okay, let's do that,'" she says, laughing.
The Secrets We Keep is in cinemas from November 19.