» L7 Interview: The Girl Who Played With Fire
Blazing A Trail:Noomi Rapace talks to Glen Ferris about taking on the role of troubled heroine Lisbeth Salander in The Girl Who Played With Fire
Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander is one of modern literature’s most fascinating characters and she’s obviously got a huge following. How did it feel when you first took on the role?
I was terrified at first. It felt like a suicide mission in a way because how could I possibly live up to everybody’s expectations? So I just said to myself, I have to give up and do it my way because there’s no way I can please everybody. I just had to push away all those outside thoughts and instead concentrate on finding Lisbeth in myself.
What do you think is Lisbeth’s appeal to audiences?
Well, I think she’s something new and fresh. She’s a character who has been through so many terrible things in her life and everybody has let her down – society, the government, her social worker, her school, her father, you know, everybody. But she doesn’t feel sorry for herself and she doesn’t see herself as a victim, she’s a fighter and she’s trying to find a way to live life the way she wants to. I think people have always loved underdogs who are fighting the system and the abuse of power – the big dragons, you know.
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo movie was a huge success around the world. What can we expect from parts two and three?
They’re pretty close to the books. It’s difficult because the books are so thick but we tried to get the most important things from the books, and you get to know why Lisbeth becomes the way she is when her past is slowly revealed. She ends up being the main suspect in three murders and she has to find the killer herself, and that leads her back to her father and this big, dramatic confrontation.
Steig Larsson was said to have based the character of Lisbeth on an imagined older and more twisted version of Pippi Longstocking. Did you know that?
I didn’t know that, that’s interesting. I think Lisbeth is actually pretty closely based on him. He was a workaholic, too, and he liked to stay on his own. Everybody thinks Mikael Blomkvist is the alter ego of Steig Larsson but I think Mikael is the journalist he really wanted to be and Lisbeth is who he actually really was.
The tattoos you have in the movie are fake, but the piercings are real. What made you want to get them done?
I’ve always tried to do whatever I can to really get into the character, so if I had to get pierced I will do that, and if I had to get fat then I will do that as well. In the third film I had a really big Mohawk and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought to myself, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’ and I’m stuck with this haircut. But that’s just the way I like to work.
Director David Fincher and actor Daniel Craig are working on a Hollywood remake of the series, do you think it will work?
It’s very hard with American remakes. If you look at something like Vanilla Sky [adaptation of Spanish film Abre los ojos], I think the original was much better, and in many cases that’s true, but I guess we’ll see.
The Girl Who Played With Fire is in cinemas Friday. Glen Ferris is managing editor of www.screenrush.co.uk
