System reboot
The Girl In The Spider’s Web looks for surprises in a familiar franchise
EVERYONE IS SCARED of giving away spoilers on the set of The Girl In The Spider’s Web — which seems odd, considering the novel it’s adapted from, by David Lagercrantz, was published three years ago. Instead of rebooting The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (again), or moving on to its follow-up, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Sony has opted to tackle the fourth instalment in the Millennium series (and the first not written by original author Stieg Larsson, who died in 2004), which sees Lisbeth Salander and journalist Mikael Blomkvist embroiled in a world of government spies and cyber criminals.
Here, Claire Foy stars as Salander, taking over the role from Rooney Mara, who starred in David Fincher’s 2011 English-language adaptation. Having shot to fame in Netflix hit The Crown, the pierced, mohawk-sporting superhacker with an unwavering disdain for authority seemed a daring next step for Foy. But as she sees it, it was the Queen Of England that bucked the trend. “All the parts I’d had up to playing Elizabeth were the opposite of her as well,” she explains. “So that felt more of a departure for me than this.”
As for stepping into the combat boots of both Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara (“Two amazing names, and then there’s just ‘Claire’,” she notes selfdeprecatingly), Foy brushes aside any sense of pressure. “As an actor, you’re very used to reincarnating roles. I’m from England; we do a lot of Shakespeare. I’m my version of Lisbeth Salander, which will inevitably be both different and similar. Either way, it’s a lovely club to join.”
Other new members to the family include up-and-comers Vicky Krieps, Lakeith Stanfield and Sylvia Hoeks, joining the cast as the film explores Salander’s tragic backstory, while director Fede Álvarez is the newbie behind the camera. Unlike Fincher, who doubled down on the cold and the cerebral, Foy assures us Álvarez’s horror-thriller background (he directed the well-received Evil Dead remake) will amplify the story’s action. “I couldn’t have taken the job just for the role alone — it was all him really,” she admits.
While previous Millennium films have been a two-hander between Salander and Blomkvist (Sverrir Gudnason), The Girl In The Spider’s Web concentrates much more on the inked hacker. For Foy, this plays to the characters’ strengths. “Mikael’s much easier to understand, but with these stories, the audience doesn’t want that,” explains Foy. “They don’t want someone they know. They want someone they want to be — someone weird and extraordinary. They want to be surprised.” If The Girl In The Spider’s Web reveals the inner Lisbeth Salander in all of us, that might be the biggest shock of all.