Noomi Rapace reunites with her Girl With The Dragon Tattoo director Niels Arden Oplev for the neo-noir crime thriller Dead Man Down. In the film, Rapace takes on the role of Beatrice, a beautician whose face has been hideously scarred in a car accident, and this injury has forever crippled how she sees herself as a person.
When she gets to know Victor (Colin Farrell), the man who lives in the apartment building across the street from her, Beatrice feels she has found a person who can help to end her emotional suffering. But like Victor she is seeking vengeance to correct a grave injustice. Pretty soon both Victor and Beatrice find themselves in mortal danger as they are forced to make choices that will forever change the course of their lives.
Recently, Noomi joined us for an interview on the film where she talked about working with Niels again after their tremendous triumph with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, how Beatrice differs from her Dragon Tattoo character Lisbeth Salander and how enjoyable it was to work with co-star Colin Farrell.
Check it out below.
We Got This Covered: How is it reuniting with Niels?
Noomi Rapace: Very good. I’ve been kind of hoping, wanting, asking him when we should work together again after The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and he was like “we will find something but it needs to be something really good.” He was reading lots of scripts and I was reading lots of scripts and most of them were not that good, and when they sent me this one I just saw in the email that he was attached to it and I was like “okay.” And then I read the script and I loved it, and I called him and was like “are you really doing this?” because you never know. He said “yeah, what do you think?” I said that I really liked it because I love when I read a script and I can’t see where it’s going and I can’t predict what the scene is going to be like. I think the story takes so many different turns and twists. It’s almost like a crazy ride that you just have to jump on.
We Got This Covered: Would you still have done the movie if Niels didn’t direct it?
Noomi Rapace: I don’t know. There are a lot of good directors out there. One thing that was really good in this specific situation was that I came from a Brian DePalma movie that I shot in Berlin which I finished in early May, and I started to shoot Dead Man Down in Philadelphia five days later. So I had five days to switch, and because I knew Niels we could go straight into the work. We didn’t need to kind of dance around.
We Got This Covered: What do you think makes Colin Farrell such a unique actor?
Noomi Rapace: I think Colin and I became really close very fast, and I think we are similar in the way we worked. I couldn’t sleep and he couldn’t sleep, and I went out to the balcony to have cigarette and he was out on the balcony having a cigarette too. I was like “so you can’t sleep” and he was like “no,” and then we start talking about lines and making small adjustments and stuff. I think both of us work in that way when we decide to do something, we do it 100%. I loved working with him. He’s so supportive and he’s such a team player. One day the camera is on and he was off camera for like 10 hours without even mentioning it, and then they turned on him and did two takes and it was like “it’s a wrap!” Many actors wouldn’t do that, I think. He’s a very good person.
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