Born in Sweden as Noomi Noren, Swedish actress Noomi Rapace lived in Iceland with her mother and stepfather in a town of people mostly afflicted with Down’s Syndrome. She caught the acting bug when she got a nonspeaking role in an Icelandic film at age 7, and moved back to Sweden to start her acting career when she was 15. In Stockholm, she enrolled in the National Academy of Mime and Acting and she got her first job in a Swedish soap opera the following year. She started working at the Royal Dramatic Theatre at age 20 and continued her theatrical career for a decade, saying in press interviews that being on stage was the only time she felt fully alive and that helped her battle her personal demons.

0in;background:white’>The producers of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo saw her on stage in Blasted, a dark play written by a British playwright, Sarah Kane, who had committed suicide. (The play was called “a moral outrage” by the New York Times’ reviewer in a positive review.) They also saw her in another grim project, her film Daisy Diamond, where she played a troubled young actress who drowns her baby in a bathtub. She told the Telegraph of the pain she put herself through for the role. “I couldn’t walk sometimes. I’m not kidding. I was on my knees and crawling to the bathroom to pee. I was on really strong painkillers. The producer sent me to doctors, to chiropractors, to osteopaths. And nobody could find anything wrong with me. I can’t explain it, what acting does to me. It was almost as if my body had taken her story into it. But it wasn’t real. It was completely in my head.”

Rapace was offered the role of Lisbeth Salander in Dragon Tattoo. Salander was a computer hacker with dyed black hair, piercings, and tattoos, and the role would turn out to be her breakthrough to international stardom in 2009. “I felt this deep connection with the character,” Rapace told Vice. “I knew we were meant for each other and I knew I could give her my soul.” A seven-month preproduction period involved grueling kick-boxing and motorcycling training for her to get in shape for the role. She even got six body piercings but drew the line at actual tattoos.

There were two sequels: The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, both also released in 2009.

Robert Downey, Jr. while doing press for Dragon Tattoo, she didn’t really speak English all that well. She ended up getting offered a part in his Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) anyway. She explained to Vice News in 2017: “Next up for Rapace was Ridley Scott’s Prometheus in 2012, in the role of a scientist who gives herself a caesarian to get an alien out of her body, right after she finished work on Sherlock Holmes. Then in 2013, she appeared in Brian De Palma’s Passion alongside Rachel McAdams, yet another dour story about a woman who murders her boss.

At another HFPA press conference, Rapace told us how she gets into the skin of the really dark characters she keeps playing. “I realized that I always start with the pain. I always start with grief. My first step to understand a character, I always go back to where the mirror was smashed in a way, you know, to where the heart kind of broke. Even though it’s like a big crash or a small crash, everybody experiences at some point in their life when it feels like your heart can’t do it, when it’s too much, you know? That you don’t know how to deal with it. So I always go back to those moments and I always try to find in my characters those moments when it almost feels like an arrow hit your heart and you think you’re going to die and then you find a way to live through it.”

Colin Farrell directed by her Dragon Tattoo director Niels Arden Oplev, she played a mysterious woman with a scarred face who gets involved with the mob. In 2014, she appeared in The Drop, co-starring with Tom Hardy and James Gandolfini as the ex-girlfriend of a mad man in yet another mob tale. She reunited in 2015 with Hardy for Child 44, the story of a Soviet serial killer directed by Daniel Espinosa.