In the video below, Noomi Rapace, the star of a trio of new Swedish films based on Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, discusses her approach to the role of Lisbeth Salander, a punk hacker sleuth who works in tandem with liberal Stockholm journalist Mikael Blomkvist to solve homicides.
Larsson’s books have become a publishing phenomenon, already having sold more than 22 million copies in 44 languages. Ironically, Larsson died before the trilogy was published. Originally, the Swedish journalist turned mystery writer had planned to write a cycle of ten novels featuring the Salander-Blomkvist duo.
Ten-novel cycles are practically de rigueur in Swedish crime literature. The pioneers of Scandinavian procedurals, Mai Sjowall and Per Wahloo, published their Martin Beck series in ten installments, and more recently another Swedish publishing phenom, Hanning Menkell, has done the same with his Kurt Wallander series. Sadly, Larsson’s legions of fans will have to make do with a simple trilogy.
What sets the Millennium books apart from many of the other offerings in the current Nordic noir craze is the character of Lisbeth Salander. The English editions highlight Salander’s centrality to the books’ themes with title references: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; The Girl Who Played with Fire; and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. The original Swedish titles would be translated as, respectively, Men Who Hate Women; The Girl Who Played with Fire (the same as the English title); and The Castle in the Air That Exploded.
The Salander character is a quirky, bisexual social misfit; she’s also a prodigious hacker with a photographic memory. There are hints in the books that she either has Asperger’s Syndrome, or is borderline autistic. However you parse her character, she provides much of the emotional and psychological energy in the linked narratives, and one can easily see how she might have become the hub of a long-running franchise, both in print and on the screen, had Larsson lived to pen the remaining seven books of the cycle.
With a lead character so distinctive, casting for the role was critical to the success of the films. Rapace, whose ethnic origins are an Icelandic-Spanish cocktail, has a slightly exotic appearance (in a Nordic context, at any rate) that is fitting for the part. In order to convince producers that she could convincingly fill Salander’s shoes, however, she had to undergo a transformation. She spent several months grooming herself: she cut her hair and dyed it black; she had her nose and ears pierced; she became licensed to drive a motorcycle; and she trained in kick-boxing.
The metamorphosis is stunning. Many readers of Larsson’s books will no doubt see the living embodiment of the character they had already clearly visualized over the course of reading the three Millennium books. Fortunately, the filmmakers had the foresight to film all three books in a batch, to ensure continuity. The first in the series, “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” will open in U.S. theaters in March, 2010.