You know her as Elizabeth Shaw, the intrepid scientist who makes a brief appearance in
Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant after starring in its predecessor, Prometheus.
But the woman who plays her — Swedish actress Noomi Rapace — has been heating up Hollywood
since her breakout in 2009.
Here are all the places you've seen her before.
The Millennium Trilogy
Thanks to director David Fincher and a $90 million Hollywood budget, you've probably
heard of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — and its titular protagonist, the brooding, tattooed
Lisbeth Salander.
But two years before Rooney Mara earned an Oscar nomination for playing Stieg Larsson's
heroine, Noomi Rapace played the role to great acclaim in her native Sweden.
In fact, it's unlikely that Lisbeth Salander would have ever gotten a big-budget outing
in mainstream Hollywood if the Swedish actress hadn't turned in such a stunner of a performance
first.
While The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is pretty much a household name, Stieg Larsson's Millennium
book series was actually adapted as a trilogy.
Noomi Rapace reprised her role as Lisbeth Salander in two more movies, The Girl Who
Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.
All told, Rapace spent a full year playing Lisbeth, a performance that resulted in three
feature films, six television episodes' worth of raw material, and rave reviews across the
board.
However, once she was done, she was really done.
In an interview with NPR, the actress said:
"[It] was kind of strange.
You know the last day, after [we filmed] the last scene, all the producers came with champagne
and everybody wanted to celebrate.
And I just said, 'I need to go to the bathroom,' and I just started to throw up.
It was like my body was physically throwing Lisbeth out."
The Monitor
Compared to Rapace's work in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Swedish horror film
The Monitor was pretty low-profile, except in Sweden.
But fans of the genre will recognize it — and more importantly, its leading lady, for her
pitch-perfect performance as a woman on the brink of insanity.
The Monitor is an understated slow burner featuring the creepiest home appliance ever:
the baby monitor.
Rapace is memorable as a traumatized single mother who just wants to listen to her kid
while he sleeps, but gets an earful of something sinister instead.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
For those who hadn't already discovered Noomi Rapace via the Dragon Tattoo trilogy, there
was no missing her in her big-budget debut alongside Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law.
Rapace played Madame Simza in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, channeling her trademark
ferocity into the role of a Romani gypsy woman who gets caught up in a deadly conspiracy
spearheaded by Sherlock's archnemesis Moriarty.
And her performance is doubly impressive because she had to cross a huge language barrier to
do it.
Rapace revealed in an interview:
"I didn't speak English like three years ago, and for me to find a way to be free and be
able to live in this language…
instead of [feeling] like you're stuck in this prison of control where you can do perfect
lines but you can't improvise and you can't ad-lib ... after a week I'd forgotten about
it.
It's the way they work.
Those boys are fantastic."
Dead Man Down
Of course you recognize Noomi Rapace from Prometheus, but after leaving the Alien franchise,
Noomi Rapace reunited with Niels Arden Oplev — the man who helmed the original Swedish
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — for Dead Man Down
In addition to Rapace, Dead Man Down also boasts a cast that includes Colin Farrell,
Dominic Cooper, and Terrence Howard.
Unfortunately, despite all that star power, the movie itself wasn't particularly well
received...by anyone.
One critic at Variety called it "revenge-fantasy dreck" and "a derivative collection of brazen
plot holes and late-night-cable cliches."
The Drop
Adapted by Dennis Lehane from his own short story, "Animal Rescue," The Drop is a quiet
film noir about crime, vengeance, and decent men who do very bad things in the basements
of Brooklyn bars.
And for Noomi Rapace, it presented a serious challenge: namely, having to hold her own
onscreen against not just Tom Hardy, who'd just become super famous after doing Inception
and The Dark Knight Rises back-to-back, but also the world's most adorable pit bull puppy.
Child 44
Perhaps thanks to her incredible chemistry with Tom Hardy in The Drop, Noomi Rapace turned
up immediately in another movie with the British actor, this time as his wife in the Soviet-era
thriller Child 44.
In it, Hardy plays disgraced Stalin security officer Leo Demidov, who tries to track a
serial killer against the wishes of his government.
Though this film didn't get as much attention as some of Rapace's other projects thanks
to a limited release in the U.S., everyone turned in solid performances that made for
a tense, effective political thriller… even if everyone in it struggles occasionally with
their Russian accents.
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