Noomi Rapace tells us about her new film “Lamb” in which she plays a grieving woman who has decided to raise as her child a strange creature, half-human, half-lamb.
Lamb, a strange story carried by Noomi Rapace
We knew her as a gothic hacker in the trilogy Millennium, as a partner of Sherlock Holmes, as a space archaeologist in Prometheus, and she was even seven sisters in Seven sisters. Noomi Raptor is an actress who will not be forgotten. A face that marks and exudes a great delicacy, sometimes even a certain fragility. However, the actress, born in Sweden but who grew up in Iceland, is far from a fragile little thing. Quite the contrary.
We experienced this by meeting her during the promotion of Lamb. It is with confidence and a lot of humor that she spoke to us about this strange and yet so simple film which allowed her to return to the Lands where she was born spiritually.
I was born in Sweden but I built myself as a person and really started to exist when I was in Iceland. It was there that I had one of my first memories of when I was five years old. So this movie brought me back to where it all started for me. It was special, it allowed me to remember why I do this job. Who I want to play for and how. It kind of tied up a lot of things in me.
In Lamb, she plays Maria who lives with her companion on a farm in the middle of nowhere and raise a flock of sheep. One day one of the animals gives birth to a mysterious creature, between human and lamb. Without asking any questions, Maria adopts him as if he were her own child, the one she could not keep years before. Lamb is therefore a real UFO (see our review), and this is precisely what touched Noomi Rapace.
I fell in love with the story because it’s so original. It is both a beautiful and simple portrait of a family and of mourning. And in the middle there is one thing, let’s say, that’s strange. So it’s the combination of naturalism and everyday life with a surreal element, and that’s what I love.
Not the only star of the movie
Throughout the film, the actress impresses with her stature, her ability to say a lot without using words. The dialogues being little present in Lamb, it is through the body that emotion is created. A constraint that led Noomi Rapace to rethink her beginnings as an actress.
I like to challenge myself and Lamb was one of them. When there is no dialogue, we cannot hide. It’s a feeling that I discovered when I started my career playing in the theater where we appear in their entirety. It was quite a similar experience.
The shooting was also particular for Noomi Rapace because, in front of her, there was not always a human to give her the answer, but an animal. Indeed, one of the great strengths of the feature film isuse animals, and more particularly sheep, such as characters in their own right. They are not decorative objects, but real protagonists from which the director Valdimar Jóhannsson manages to draw a game.
The animals were real colleagues. You had to be quite open-minded with the sheep because you didn’t really know what it was going to be like, but I felt on the same level as them. However, I had to think about different ways of communicating. But deep down, it was like being in front of very young children. Because both cannot speak. So you have to trust your instincts.
Lamb is to be discovered at the cinema from December 29.
