“I read people well. Maybe a little too much. When I was little I could spot when people weren’t telling the truth. I knew. It’s still like this: I see when no one tells me everything. Even if there is not always much that can be done about it. ” Noomi Rapace has a loud laugh, the kind that rolls across the moor.
The best, perhaps, to sum up the happy kaleidoscope that the actress embodies on screen, would be to watch the clip she shot in 2012 for the Rolling Stones: Doom & Gloom. Everything is there. The defiant air of the destroy punkette Millennium, the adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s novels, which made him explode on the international scene in 2009… Les moues de la femme fatale, gypsy at Guy Ritchie (Sherlock Holmes: game of shadows) or perverse killer at De Palma (Passion)… The muscles of the testosterone Rambo girl for Hollywood action movie (bodyguard in Close, by Vicky Jewson, intergalactic medic in Prometheus, by Ridley Scott…). Finally – and perhaps above all – the fragile, lost and impenetrable gaze of the one who, at 42, continues to be above all a humanoid in search of her truth as we rediscover it today as on the first day in Lamb, by Valdimar Johannsson.
Noomi Rapace, alias Noomi Noren, was born in the forest in the middle of nowhere, in the north of Sweden, to a bohemian actress mother and a Spanish father, half gypsy, flamenco singer lost in the North, that she hardly knew. The man who raised her is Icelandic, the son of a peasant, fed on peat and alcohol in these desert lands where Lamb was filmed: the story of a couple of shepherds who are raising a half-human, half-human child, whom a sheep has given birth to …
“A soldier’s discipline “
Little Noomi also grew up here on the volcanic island between 5 and 8 years old. “ When we landed, I immediately had this feeling that I belonged to this country, that it embraced me, that my personality was in harmony with this nature. I had always felt like I was “too much”: too fast, too emotional, too explosive. In Sweden, nature itself retains its energies. While in Iceland we take it in the face. “
To make a living, her parents found a job in a center where about fifty families live full time to take care of 200 to 300 young people with Down’s syndrome. For the kid, a school of difference. The experiment will last three years.
When they return to Sweden, Noomi takes up judo to pour out this energy that overwhelms her. She’s 10. “ A girl was meant to be sweet and cute. I didn’t know how to do that, so after judo, I did taekwondo, and then jujitsu and all that… A good way to land in my body and use my strength and my frustration ”, says the one who, before meeting us, got up at 4 a.m., went to the gym, to the sauna, took an icy shower – “A discipline of a soldier “ – and landed on stiletto heels from a women’s magazine. “ I have enormous willpower. When I decide to do something, I stick to it. I don’t do anything halfway, the 50% is not part of my grammar, and that can be a problem because it can be very black or white. “
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