After achieving international fame with her starring role in Niels Arden Oplev’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Noomi Rapace caught the eye of Hollywood and went on to score roles in a pair of major productions: Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows” and Ridley Scott’s sci-fi sorta-prequel “Prometheus.” Now she’s back with Oplev for “Dead Man Down,” an English-language revenge thriller co-starring Colin Farrell and scripted by “Fringe”‘s J.H. Wyman. So how did she end up working with the director a second time?
“Well, I loved working with him on the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And we are both very…we have strong opinions, we’re both very passionate, and he can be very stubborn…and I’m kind of…[laughs] you know, quite similar to him,” said Rapace, sitting down to chat with me about the film recently. “I’ve been wanting…to find something to do with him. So when they sent me this script, and I saw just in the email that he was attached to it, I called him up straightaway. I was like, ‘Is this true, are you doing this?’ And he said, ‘yeah, read it and let me know.'”
And the rest, as they say, is history. Regarding the plot of film itself, Rapace plays the role of Beatrice, a former beautician who blackmails a rising star in the criminal underworld (Farrell) to hunt down and kill the drunk driver who left her permanently scarred on one side of her face. If he doesn’t, she threatens to expose him for who he really is – an impostor who has assumed an alias in order to infiltrate the gang run by the crime boss he holds responsible for the murder of his wife and daughter.
One of the more intriguing aspects of “Dead Man Down” is Beatrice’s false belief that if she successfully snuffs out the man who stole away her beauty, she will somehow be reborn. As comments on our painfully shallow culture go, it’s a pretty potent one.
“Beauty and being attractive and being perfect, it’s not everything,” Rapace offered. “Even though in this world, for women, especially, it’s so important to be beautiful. And people judge you very hard if you don’t look attractive in a way, and I think people treat a woman who’s not beautiful in a very different way than someone who’s actually attractive. So it was really interesting…[the] subject matter was really something that I wanted to kind of look into.”
Care to hear more? Click on the video above for the full interview.
“Dead Man Down” hits theaters this Friday.