Do we like Noomi Rapace?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Nothing harmful or dodgy turned up and there's real good work, but she says little in public about the big causes, so it's a solid seven, not a ten.
Noomi Rapace was born Noomi Norén in 1979 and moved from Sweden to Iceland with her mum when she was little. She was in a small Icelandic film at about seven, and by 15 she was living alone in Stockholm trying to make it as an actor. That's a tough start, and it shows in the work.
She told the Irish Times that acting saved her life, and that people who knew her as a teenager were surprised she'd made it through. She also turned down more Dragon Tattoo films, saying she didn't “like to repeat myself”. That's the pattern: she picks the odd, spiky roles over the safe ones.
Now the harm check, and I looked properly. Nothing turned up from her on trans or LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants, vaccines or climate that would worry us. She's also not a loud political voice, so the record is thin rather than glowing. The projects I could confirm, like Mother, are mainstream and don't suggest any dodgy company.
The recent news is a film and a trophy, not a stoush. She plays Mother Teresa in Mother, as a complicated young woman before she was famous, and she told Variety “She was no saint.” The Gothenburg Film Festival gave her its Nordic Honorary Dragon Award earlier this year when the film opened in Scandinavia. Nothing new on her lately beyond that.
The real good stuff: in 2015 she became a goodwill ambassador for ECPAT Sweden, which works against the sexual exploitation of children. She said she was “proud to become their next Goodwill Ambassador”, and that she knows people who were hurt that way as kids. That's a cause with a cost to her image if she got it wrong, and she's backed it publicly.
So would we support her? Yes. She has no court record or accusations that I could find, nothing nasty on the record, and a charity role worth respecting. The one hesitation is that she says little publicly about the issues we care most about. If she starts speaking up for LGBTQ+ people and the planet, that number goes up.