Noomi Rapace, NYT Mag: “I thought LA was about… glossy big lips and big t-ts”

Despite what you might have heard, Noomi Rapace is the lead in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus, not Charlize Theron. Over the past few months, I’ve been seeing Charlize’s involvement in the film get rolled back a bit in the press – don’t go into the film expecting to see a “Charlize movie”. It’s a Noomi movie. Many of us who saw the original Swedish film trilogy of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, et al, know that Noomi is extraordinarily talented. Her first foray into big Hollywood studio films was Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, which, in my opinion, wasn’t all that great. The film was a mess and Noomi did what she could with the material, but it wasn’t great. So… I have high hopes for Prometheus. I’m also hoping Noomi does more interviews, because she comes across as a very strange, other-worldly creature in this New York Times Magazine cover profile. You can read the full thing here, and here are some highlights:

Noomi doesn‘t want to go Hollywood: “I don’t have this crazy dream about going to Hollywood,” she says in the video, “because I really love to watch movies and do movies that are complicated, and I want more strange things and complicated things.”

She has an 8-year-old son, Lev: During my visit to Berlin, the weather was improbably balmy, and a youngish, well-turned-out set found its way to the rooftop pool and bar at the Soho House Berlin, a hotel and club in a restored Bauhaus building that at one time was the headquarters of the Hitler Youth and before that a Jewish-owned department store. There among the sunbathers, paddling around the small pool, was a cheerful, toothy boy wearing a mask and a snorkel: this was Rapace’s son, Lev, age 8. In February he came with his mother to Berlin, where he attended a Swedish school. He would spend the latter part of the spring in Turkey to be with his father, Noomi’s ex-husband, Ola Rapace. (An actor himself, Ola had gone to Turkey to play a villain in the next James Bond movie, “Skyfall.”) Noomi joined Lev in the water for a while, and later she warned him not to splash too much, for the sake of the people in the poolside loungers, though privately she grumbled that people who can’t abide a splash or two shouldn’t sit next to the pool.

When she married, she and her husband changed their names: Noomi Noren was 21 when she started dating Ola Norell, and three months later they married, inventing the surname “Rapace,” pronounced ra-PAHS, which means “bird of prey” in French. (“I always had a very strong thing with those birds and the concentration they had,” she says.) She had been performing onstage in Stockholm, and when she became pregnant, two years after marrying, her colleagues told her she was nuts to derail a budding career by having a child so young. “I’ve never seen it that way,” she says. “It’s better to not be afraid of things and not avoid things. I thought, Now I know how it is to be pregnant and what it’s like to be a mom.” As an actor, she knew she could make use of those experiences.

Moving from Sweden to Iceland as a girl: She was 5 when her stepfather, a teacher, and her mother, a stage actress turned drama teacher, moved the family from Sweden to Solheimar, Iceland, a tiny village founded in the 1930s as a haven for disabled people. (Rapace didn’t meet her biological father, a Spanish flamenco singer, until she was a teenager.) When the family moved to Solheimar, Rapace said, it was populated mostly by teenagers and adults with Down syndrome, and as a very young girl from another country, she found them menacing. “I was afraid of them,” she says. “To me they were like big trolls. I was not allowed to be angry with them, but they were quite mean sometimes, violent and sexual.”

Her punk youth in Stockholm: She went punk, bleaching her hair and piercing herself and, she says, drinking whatever the guys were drinking. “I’ve always wanted to compete with the guys,” she says. It’s a phase in her life that she seems disinclined to revisit. She happened to show me a pair of long, white tracks on the top of her arm, at first saying that they were a result of an adolescent attempt to tattoo herself, then saying that she was interested, back then, in the idea of becoming blood brothers and blood sisters with people, and finally telling me, “That period is not so interesting.”

Going Hollywood: “I thought L.A. was more about celebrities and red carpets and glossy big lips and big tits,” Rapace says. “I said to [my agent] Shelley when we met: ‘I don’t want to go to Hollywood. That’s not for me. I want to do real movies.’ And then she said, ‘But who do you actually like?’ I started to mention people, and she said, ‘Those people actually live in L.A.’ ”

She wants to be one of the boys: “I’m terrified of being too famous,” she says. “What I’m really afraid of is that the audiences will go into the theater and not be able to forget that it’s me, that fame will stand in the way of my acting. I want to keep being able to change into different shapes and different personalities.” She says she never wants to play the sexy sidekick and that she still wants to compete with the guys — Leonardo DiCaprio, Josh Brolin, Christian Bale and Michael Fassbender, her “Prometheus” co-star, are among the actors she admires. “They’re not working out of vanity,” she says. “They’re not trying to look hot all the time.”

[From The New York Times]

Ah, Noomi wants to be Michael Fassbender. Sigh. It’s like that old saying – “Men want to be him, women want to be with him…” Only in Noomi’s case it’s “Men want to be him, women want to be him too.” Anyway, the most startling news to me was that Noomi is a mom to an 8-year-old son. I had no idea!

Photos courtesy of WENN, NYT Mag.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

43 Responses to “Noomi Rapace, NYT Mag: “I thought LA was about… glossy big lips and big t-ts””

Comments are Closed

We close comments on older posts to fight comment spam.

  1. Maguita says:

    Such a fearless actress! An actor’s actor, bad-ass to the bone.

    From what I’ve read though, neither her childhood, teen years, nor marriage were happy ones. Rather violent, especially the marriage. Or was that just an ex-boyfriend?

    Asli???

    • Gwen says:

      There are quite a few rumours about Ola Rapace being a violent ass but I don’t know if it’s more than rumours. They seem to get along very well now, so who knows.

      • Maguita says:

        When the American version of GWDT was announced, someone on this site had talked about Noomi’s hard life with an ex. A very much abusive ex. I just can’t for the life of me remember if it was ex-husband or ex-boyfriend.

        And Asli, hope I am remembering correctly, hails from the Netherlands, and brings us gossip that we don’t usually hear about Scandinavian and Northern European actors.

  2. Amy says:

    Love her! I can’t wait to see Prometheus.

  3. birdie says:

    She and her ex-husband invented their last name? You can do that? Lily and Marshall Skywalker anyone?

    • telesma says:

      Yes, in the US you just have to go through the legal process to change both your names, though it may be different in other countries. Also, a lot of actors choose professional names to go by when they join the Actors Guild. I think they can’t join with the same name as anyone else who’s already joined or something like that. I’m not sure if they changed their names legally, or if they just chose those names when they joined the AG.

  4. marie says:

    I feel the same way, if you don’t want to get wet, then why the hell are you sitting next to a pool?!? While I don’t think you should cannonball folks, a splash here or there ain’t gonna kill you..Sorry for the mini-rant there, and she seems like a lovely woman.

  5. Bubbling says:

    She will always be Lisbeth Salander. I hated her character through the movies btw, though I can’t say she was bad

  6. Aiobhan says:

    Yesterday it was Fassbender, today Noomi. I am just lucking up on the awesome stories coming to this site. I was hoping that this article was covered. She looks amazing. Her teen years were troublesome but the cool thing about her is that she seems to have learned and grown from her mistakes and does not blame anyone or go on ad nausuem about how sad her childhood was. I want to be Noomi when I grow up.

  7. Feebee says:

    Despite her thinking a part of her life was not interesting, it’s certainly helped mould her into a strangely fascinating person.

    Had to laugh at the pool thing. That’s exactly what I do… ask the kids not to splash while muttering about idiots sitting poolside who can’t handle a few drops of water.

  8. lucy says:

    I agree with her about the fact that actors too famous can’t hide themselves behind their characters like the Jolie-Pitts or Clooney, now they’re too much themselves, they can’t be someone else. Only few can do it like Sean Penn, Meryl Streep.

    • Crystal says:

      THIS.

      It’s so hard to watch George Clooney and not feel like I’m watching George Clooney.

      There’s a reason why Tilda Swinton, Glenn Close, Daniel Day Lewis and Edward Norton are so believable in their roles. Their respected actors but their not huge celebrities so you don’t know much about their personal lives. That’s the way to do it.

      Brad Pitt is so underrated as an actor because of this imo. He’s too much of a celebrity now.

      • Liv says:

        Brad Pitt is actually a really good actor! I think nobody’s recognizing that because he’s good-looking and part of a celebrity couple, but he really is (and I’m not a fan).

      • Gia says:

        Sometimes I think Brad is crap and then I watch Kalifornia and am reminded that he is actually brilliant.

      • telesma says:

        I ignored Brad Pitt for years because I thought he was just a pretty face. Then I saw him in ‘Snatch’ and thought “oh, wow, he’s an amazing actor”. After that I made a point of seeing his movies. I also think that, in general, he chooses fairly interesting projects, so that’s another point in his column.

    • ViktoryGin says:

      co-sign

    • danielle says:

      Agreed. Also, if you’re a big jerk (ie Sean “it’s good to hit your wife” Connery), I can no longer watch the movies and enjoy myself. It’s good to maintain some mystery.

  9. Bellabumbum says:

    She was a superior Lisbeth. I preferred the Swedish movies.

    I do love an actor who cares about her craft, not her looks. It’s refreshing in this day of fillers, lip injections, eating disorders and breast implants.

    • Maguita says:

      Agree.

      It is hard not to prefer the original Lisbeth, and always compare unfavorably the American version. Although Rooney Mara also did a bang up job, sadly, Noomi was there first, 4 years ahead.

    • Liv says:

      Yeah, she really WAS Lisbeth Salander, she was amazing in that role! Unbelievable they made another TGWTDT movie just months after the swedish one and unbelievable Rooney Mara got an Oscar nomination and Rapace didn’t.

  10. Zoe says:

    Noomi is the most interesting actress to come along in ages. Wasn’t mad on sherlock and her part sucked. But then guy Richie can’t write for women. Ridley scott most definetly can so I have high hopes for her new movie. She has a quality about her that not many actresses in hw has at the moment so I want to see her in lots of new movies. She is also a real actors actor. What many people don’t know is that the swedes have a theatrical tradition almost as strong as the Brits and the Russians. And thats we’re people like noomi is coming from.

  11. lil ole me says:

    Loved her in the “Dragon” role. She has a great profile also. What a great quote: “that fame will stand in the way of my acting”. So true, for me, when I watch a movie with an actor that has been in the tabloids constantly. I can’t tune out their personal image- to grasp on the character.

  12. bns says:

    If Rooney Mara can get Oscar nominated for Dragon Tattoo, why didn’t she?

    Also love her comment about people sitting next to the pool.

  13. My Darling Pinkett says:

    I love that cover!

  14. lily says:

    Hollywood is such a vapid place. It’s refreshing to hear about an actress who cares more about the craft than her beauty and exercise routine.

  15. grace says:

    People with Down’s Syndrome reminded her of “big trolls”. Very compassionate, Noomi.

    • Jenny says:

      She said that’s how she felt as a child. Obviously she knows better now.

    • Bellabumbum says:

      That’s refreshingly honest. I was frightened too, and I have never told anyone until now, how I felt as a child. Imagine living in an entire community, as a child, devoted to the Down’s Syndrome population.

    • snapnhiss says:

      She was five years old, for pete’s sake.

  16. Reece says:

    I like her a lot. Prometheus didn’t become remotely interesting to me til I heard she was in it.

  17. erin says:

    LOVE the photos from New York Mag, wow.

  18. ZenB!tch says:

    I’m glad they mentioned her bio-dad. I was curious how she could be Swedish and look like me.

  19. F5 says:

    she’s fug.. hope she goes away..

    • Bellabumbum says:

      Of all the mouth breathers in this world and you want HER to go away? Shocking. Then again, she’s a thinking person’s actor.

  20. Gia says:

    By the caption alone I knew I loved her. Any woman who says, ‘tits’ is a friend of mine.

  21. Ally says:

    I don’t know, every few years Hollywood imports an actress billing her as a modern Ingrid Bergman and it seldom works out for long… Lena Olin, Julia Ormond, Audrey Tautou… They do a few big movies, fail to make a mark in the midwest, and then drift back to Europe or TV.

    They’re not good at the promo game, and their Euro acting style doesn’t mesh well with American movies or co-stars: naturalistic vs. hammy scene-chewing, mostly.

  22. Bodhi says:

    She IS Lisbeth. Rooney is but a parody. Noomi is an incredible actress, Sherlock 2 notwithstanding (it was a crap role).

  23. Lara says:

    I like her a lot! Great interview, and a lot of respect for her ambitions. She is equally talented as all the guys that she mentioned (great taste, btw) and deserves the best career, Hollywood or not.

  24. Otter says:

    I was so distracted during Game of Shadows by her super waxy-looking skin. I don’t care if she does botox or not, it was just reeeally distracting, especially in the tight shots.

    • carrie says:

      she’s super tiny also:it’s weird i saw Dragon Tatoo movies(swedden and american) but i only recognize how the actresses acting Lisbeth are kinny and tiny during the promotion (never in the movies)

  25. Mila says:

    She is the reason why i will watch Prometheus.

  26. Jacqueline says:

    Everyone I know and myself loves Noomi.

    More of her please!