Noomi Rapace got her first sliver of a film role in Iceland, where she lived for three years as a young child. Her stepfather was looking after the horses for a medieval spectacular called Shadow of the Raven and she had tagged along to the set. Before she knew it, she was on camera dressed as a Viking.
“It was a very small part,” she laughs. “But it changed my life. I think I discovered that you can have fun as an adult, because I saw all the actors go in every day with so much bravery and concentration. It was a really brutal story – I saw a lot of deaths -and really romantic, like Tristan and Isolde. I was standing there entranced, thinking ‘I never want to leave this universe’.”
Noomi Rapace: ‘Iceland always had this effect on me: it feels like I’m looking at myself’Credit:
A year later, the family returned to Sweden. Noomi went to acting school and was eventually catapulted to world renown as Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish film adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its two sequels. Now 41, she recently returned to Iceland to star in the stunning Lamb, which won a prize at the recent Cannes Film Festival for originality.
It is the story of a farming couple conjoined in grief following the death of their only child. Then an extraordinary event gives them the chance to be parents again, Rapace plays Maria – strong, capable, stoic – whom she describes as a mix of herself and her Icelandic grandmother.
They shot in an abandoned farmhouse; a skeleton cast and crew of 30 lived and worked there, accompanied by a flock of sheep and a cat. There was no phone signal. “Which totally isolated us,” she says. “You stop thinking. It becomes quite primitive. I became a creature in the animal kingdom more than a human in civilisation.”
Lamb was directed by Valdimar Johannsson, who wrote his weird, mythic story before asking much-garlanded novelist Sjon Sigurdsson to help develop a script. For years, the two of them met twice a week to talk about Icelandic folk tales and go to the movies.
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“For me, this is a classical story,” Johannsson says, “I know everyone is talking about it as genre or horror, but we just wanted to make an arthouse film.”
Horror, humour and something very weird in the barn
Source: Philippines Alive
