Noomi Rapace on fighting Hollywood exploitation
“Way before the ‘Me Too’ movement I was refusing to be something sweet and sexy and likeable,” Swedish actress Noomi Rapace tells Bazaar. She’s always done it her way, telling herself “that it’s not about beauty and vanity”.
She shot to prominence in Hollywood thanks to her starring role in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. A blessing, she says. “It was almost like I had a golden ticket to the factory – because I was already in based on a character really against a traditional beauty look, so I almost had my own free spot to exist.” People didn’t expect her to play the eye candy – not that that made her immune to the threat of exploitation.
“So many jobs I’ve been on that I’ve heard: ‘shouldn’t your outfit be a little bit tighter?’,” she explains, “and I’d say, ‘but why?’ and then they have to think again.” Rapace points out that if you don’t question it, wrong keeps happening, and for this reason she feels it’s up to every woman in Hollywood to take control of the situation.
Now, the outdated structure of “the way women are supposed to be, and the way men are” has an opening for change, and clearly it’s now more acceptable to push back. “But I was quite lonely at the beginning when I was questioning it,” she recalls.
As a teen, Rapace honoured her individuality. A tomboy, she naturally didn’t fit the mould formed by the glamorous girls of popular culture. “I guess from the age of 15 I knew I couldn’t do it that way, I knew that I would lose my strength and my ability to be me if I tap into those expectations,” she eloquates. Leaving home at this age after growing up on a farm, she sorely missed the scents of her two best friends: her dog and her horse. “I realised that I connected memories with smell more than vision,” she says, when becoming aware of her extreme olfactory sensitivity. But it wasn’t until over a decade later she finally found a fragrance she could enjoy.
“I could never find a fragrance that worked for me. Ever. When I grew up everyone around me smelled the same” – think the legendary Jean Paul Gaultier Classique and Issey Miyake’s L’Eau d’Issey if you were female, Dior’s Fahrenheit and Davidoff Cool Water if you were male. Rapace couldn’t relate and decided in her early 20s to make her own, “for people like me”.
Fast-forward to today and on the shelves of Selfridges you’ll find N.C.P. Olfactives, a contemporary perfumer house with facets that can be worn alone or layered to create unique signature scents. Unlike her previous perfume experiences, she wanted to create something that didn’t define her. The concept is for everyone, meaning – naturally – they’re unisex.
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“I wanted to give people a toolbox for every day – so one day you want to smell more masculine and edgier and the next day more feminine and softer, or more seductive – or whatever.” It echoes her approach to dressing: some days she’ll wear an ethereal lace dress, others a sharp suit.
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For Rapace, fragrance and film go hand in hand. “Years ago, I started using scent for roles and I realised it helped my concentration and to get into character.” For the film What Happened to Monday, she played seven sisters. During filming she listened to a different playlist and wore a different fragrance for each of them. “Some days I played all seven, so I had to change make-up, wig, costume, and the fragrance.” Last but not least, we imagine.
As with real life, the association of a smell is intrinsically linked to a fantasy persona. For another role, Rapace played a character called Nadia (in The Drop where she starred alongside Tom Hardy). “She came from a poor family, and didn’t necessarily have the best sense of style, and I remember picking a very rich, sweet sticky kind of vanilla. It was a ‘cheap’ smell and it was really hard for me to wear that the whole movie. But half way through I forgot that I personally didn’t like it, I made peace with the fragrance and was very true to her.” She also noticed the impact her fragrance had on other people.
Rapace then went straight into shooting another film with Hardy, one with a very different character which called for a contrasting scent. “One morning by mistake I put on Nadia’s fragrance and I came into make-up and Tom was like, ‘What are you doing to me, are you trying to confuse me – you smell like Nadia! We’re in Russia now, you’re my wife!’ he was so confused, and this showed me what I always suspected – everyone around you can get really affected by the way you smell.”
Rapace may be the co-creator of N.C.P. Olfactives, but she’s certainly not ‘the face’. “I don’t want to promote myself: it’s not about me, or my face, it’s not about making money or reaching as much popularity and fame as possible,” she tells us. The acronym stands for New Collective Products, which the actress says represents the opposite idea of a ‘VIP’. “A collective keeps growing, it’s about something you share.” She’s always believed in tribes, which ties into the reason she decided to exit Instagram in 2015 – because having a profile became too much of a self-serving activity.
“It can easily become the ego, about self-promotion and about how many followers you have,” Rapace feels. Plus, she muses, you categorise people as successful or not based on their following and ‘likes’, instead of seeing who they really are.
Even someone which such conviction of character like Rapace can fall prey to insecurity fed by social media. “I got too self-aware and kept thinking about ‘should I post this or not?’, ‘should I share this with the world or not?’ I don’t think that’s good for me. Too many minutes of my day thinking about how I look for the world, how this will be perceived, the comments and stuff – that’s not good for my heart.” Also, as an actress, she needs to be able to lose herself in a moment, which she says is “almost impossible if you’re constantly aware of yourself”.
It’s not surprising that Rapace’s beauty philosophy is that of happiness. And the secret? “You can read about what other people say and take advise but I think it’s all connected to being yourself.” She explains, “sometimes you have to go out and dance and party and eat shit food and have fun with your friends – and you will glow and look stunning even though you might not have taken care of yourself the way experts say you should.” Personally, she’s very disciplined. “I work out every day and I eat really healthy, but also once in a while I go out and party and drink and I have to let go – because I know that my happiness it connected to those moments with my friends.”
When fellow Hollywood stars peddle the idea of happiness making the glow show (not the wealth of fame affording them to buy much of what is considered beautiful), it seems somewhat disingenuous, but with Rapace it’s the opposite. At 39, she explains how she’s truly excited about ageing. “I love faces that you can see have lived many lives. There’s something so intriguing and sexy about a face that has lived and loved – that’s smiled and gone through sorrows as well. I find the Botox and the plastic surgery trend quite unattractive because it doesn’t show your personality. It doesn’t show the stages of what you’ve lived.”
Our collective aversion to ageing is not only about narcissism, but pride given our fear of not being picked, or worse – being replaced. Rapace theorises, “if you live to be something for someone else that’s when this kind of vanity can take a really strong grip on you. If you live for yourself and if you live for what actually makes you happy, it’s very rarely the outside.” Consider her our beauty muse.
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