Red Broadwell
Noomi Rapace is an actress unafraid of taking on a challenge. Just looking at her breakout role in 2009’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and first international leading role in Prometheus, it’s clear Rapace is game to take on some bold characters. This year, Rapace once again takes on a doomed space voyage in the AppleTV+ limited series Constellation as Jo Ericsson: an astronaut on the ISS that returns to Earth facing unspeakable horrors.
Below is our lovely chat with Rapace where we discuss the impact of motherhood on her career, both on and off-screen, her return to interstellar thrillers, and how she stays grounded during the more strenuous parts of a shoot.
Awards Radar: All right, first of course, I wanted to say that watching Constellation was a treat and you were very stellar in it, if you pardon the pun.
My first question is that you’ve taken some pretty. Mentally and physically taxing roles in your previous work on both film and TV, and is there one particular part of Joe’s character or story that made you just kind of need to take a deep breath before reading it, or like performing it?
Noomi Rapace: Yeah. The contradiction of being a person, a woman who loves her work and her career? And still, being a mother and loving being a mother. And trying to make those two things dance together and work together has been one of the greatest struggles in my life, cause they don’t really work together. It’s the most extreme version of that going up in space and leaving your child. Being gone for a year and then coming back and realizing that things are just very wrong. But that was kind of, you know, me leaving me going away, making films and series and saying goodbye to my son and, you know, coming back months later. You know, you come home for a week and here and there. But like, properly being home. There’s always something new. He’s changed. He’s not the same boy or young man, you know, he’s different and. That’s hard and. Scary. And you know you just wanna pause and be like, no, I wanna do my things. But can you just wait here for me and be the same so I could just like, so no time has really passed because I wanna be here for you all the time. But I can’t because I love my work.
Awards Radar: That actually ties in very nicely to my next question. As a mom yourself, did Alison and Jo’s relationship strike a particular chord with you?
Noomi Rapace: Yeah, totally. I think it’s so beautifully written by Peter Harness and also that Joe doesn’t speak to Alice like a kid. She talks to her like a person and that’s kind of always been how I talk to my son. You know, we’re two people. We just happen to be different ages. I’m your mom, and you’re my son. But we’re two people. Jo and Alice are the two that share and know the truth of them not being each other’s person and how they deal with it and how they become a little team. And it was just so heartbreaking and unique–the relationship between them.
AR: Yeah, that was something that really stuck out to me about the writing, was how Alice and Joe like, treat each other as if they’re on an equal playing field rather than like a weird subordinate like power dynamic happening. Yeah, motherhood and family tends to be a pretty big theme.
NR: Yeah, for sure.
AR: Motherhood is a pretty common theme in other projects you’ve taken on like Prometheus and Lamb. Is this a theme that you tend to gravitate towards with your roles or it’s just a happy coincidence?
NR: I was thinking about it the other day, but it’s never normal. Motherhood, this is. I got something really wrong about it. Or like, a strange pregnancy. Yeah. Lamb babies or aliens growing inside of my tummy. I think, you know, motherhood and being a mother is kind of one of the most primal, strongest, most transformative phases in my life, you know? When I became pregnant when I was 22, it changed my life. And having my son and. I look at life and myself differently, but it’s also one of the hardest things and I think it just makes it, strips it down to. They’re brutal truths somehow. And it’s like so many different layers and colors to explore within motherhood.
I did a movie years ago called Daisy Diamond and I did a lot of research working with professional psychosis and I met women. Basically it’s about a woman who has a baby and she can’t take care of her baby. And she ends up hurting the baby–not because she doesn’t love the baby. I did a lot of research and I realized how many mothers are struggling with motherhood. But it’s the thing we don’t talk about. It’s such a taboo. You’re supposed to love your child and everything is supposed to be so wonderful. But what if you don’t connect with your child? Or what if you get lost, like you’re not yourself anymore? You look at yourself and it’s like I’m just a mother. I’m not the woman I used to be. It’s so many nuances, and so much complexity within it. And I find that so interesting. So I guess that is like material for a lot of different characters.
AR: It’s framed as an individual struggle, but it doesn’t really have to be.
NR: Yeah.
AR: In quite a few scenes in the show, especially in episode 2–which I will be honest, scared me to death–you’re alone for long durations of the episode. Is there like a specific headspace you had for working in such relative isolation with very few other people to play off of?
NR: I really tried to use the fact that I felt fragile and scared and run down and put it into the performance rather than fighting it. I had a very strong bond with Michelle McLaren, who I’m very much in love with. Working with her was just incredible. She’s a force of nature. So I didn’t feel alone, but I felt lonely and the team around me was so brilliant. Everyone worked so hard. But it’s one of the hardest things I’ve done, just like physically being on wires, really long days. At the end of the day when I came off the wires, my whole body was shaking and I just had no more words. I kept saying to my team, “I have no more words.” I couldn’t speak because it was like I used up my concentration. I was so focused when I was there on surviving, on getting myself back to Earth, but also to manage to just technically kind of do everything that I needed to do: being on wires, holding myself up. It’s very intense for the body and then at the same time act and you know be effortless in the floating. It was very difficult. But also I love a challenge. I had pretty messed up dreams when I was shooting that episode, so I understand this scared you.
AR: I can only imagine. The whole concept of being stuck in a very confined space by yourself is just so horrifying. I was very curious to see if something like that impacted you or if that was helpful towards building your performance? Especially regarding the rest of the series, where the isolation is a lot more mental.
NR: I create routines for myself. I do the same thing every morning. I would wake up at 4:00AM, maybe go to the gym, do cardio and strength, stretch, come back to my hotel room or wherever. I’m leaving and living and then doing like ice baths. I massage my body, I dry brush my body. I have all these like different things that kind of give me walls around my mind that I feel like that puts me in a place of concentration. And where I kind of go over the day, go over the scenes and me and the team that I work with, we have it kind of we don’t even speak. It’s just automatic. The routines really help shape me and keep me on track. During the breaks, I don’t really socialize. At the end of the day, I prepped the next day. Sometimes I go back to the gym, but I don’t go out for dinners. I don’t talk to people really, so every character I do– some more than others. Especially with Jo, she took a grip over me and was kind of living in me for eight months. I was not a highly functioning person doing that. She was in charge.
AR: So you previously starred in a doomed space voyage back in Prometheus. How did it feel to kind of return to this kind of space faring sci-fi thriller genre?
NR: Oh, I loved it! Prometheus has a very special place in my heart because it was one of my first international movies and working with Ridley was wonderful. Sometimes I feel like there’s brick stones in my life road that are like significant stones. Like okay, this one I know changed the direction slightly and Ridley put a stone on my road. It’s a safe stone that I revisit sometimes and going on that journey with him so early in my career when I was just entering the International Space. When I close my eyes and revisit those places in me, it makes me feel very good. So going back to space in Constellation was a place where I enjoyed being. I’d kind of been wanting to have a reason to go back, but none of the projects so far had been the right one. And when I got the call about Constellation, I was like ohh, it’s time to go back to space.
AR: What is more conceptually scary to you: the aliens or the getting unstuck in time, multiverse deal?
NR: Definitely getting stuck in time because aliens you can fight. There’s something you can actually do, you can fight them. You can fight for your life. It’s something attacking you or you can fight to run away, to try to kill them.
AR: That’s true.
NR: You can fight back.
AR: Intangible fear is really so much worse. Was there anything particularly trippy or like, disorienting about the entire premise of being unstuck in time? Like, having to exist in multiple places at once or act in multiple different versions of the same character?
NR: I mean it was. I felt really confused sometimes and I had to think, “Wait, what do I know?” And I had to go back and think “Okay, have I been in this room before? Yes, I have. But it did not look like this because I was in the other reality”. So I would look for the bed in that corner because it’s normally in that corner. But now it’s over there. I had to kind of prepare in a different way. I was talking to Peter a lot. I was talking to my 3 directors just to try to map it out and make it very simple for myself. But sometimes I worked with the confusion because Jo is confused so I allowed myself to be like: I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know. I don’t understand. But I know I need to kind of go in that direction, cause my gut feeling is saying that.
AR: Was it interesting like having to be comfortable in that confusion while your other co-stars on the show were working in a more traditional, linear narrative format?
NR: I felt like I had no control. I felt really vulnerable and fragile sometimes. It’s an awful feeling of knowing that you are right, that you know something and you know that no one will believe you. Jo, being a scientist, has been trained to look at proofs and evidence and just facts. And then you’ve seen something that doesn’t make sense. It’s like a dead body up in space, but there’s no cases of people dying in space. So like, obviously, it doesn’t make sense. But you know what she saw and her body is telling her something and her gut feeling; all of a sudden, you need to embrace your senses and trust something that can’t be proven. So it becomes an internal conflict, like an internal war. She has like a war zone inside, and she knows how mad it sounds. And then more and more, she’s like: “I know that the only thing I can do is to trust what I feel and what my entire being is telling me, even if I can’t prove it.”. Then you start to try to prove it. So I had to kind of go into it almost like homework every day of making it and breaking it down. What are the simple facts? What do I know and what are unknown factors?
AR: I like a story that requires a spreadsheet.
NR: Oh yeah.
AR: Thank you so, so much. This was a very lovely interview. Again. Absolutely stellar show again, sorry for the pun.
NR: Thank you. Thank you so much.
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