‘How I infiltrated the secret world of female bodyguards’
Female bodyguards have been in the news, and now they’re on screen in new film ‘Close’. Star Noomi Rapace talks to Cara Mcgoogan
Noomi Rapace is driving a beaten-up, red Moroccan taxi when she pulls the gearstick and it comes off in her hand. She panics. “I have to jam it back in and – by some divine reason – it hooks and I manage to stop the car,” she says, recalling the incident months later from the comfort of Claridge’s bar in London. “That sort of thing happened all the time. It was very real.”
We are discussing the actress’s forthcoming role in the film Close, released on Netflix this week, in which she plays a female bodyguard charged with looking after a rich heiress and kidnap target. The role is in keeping with Rapace’s tradition of playing strong, subversive women – she made her name as hacker Lisbeth Salander in the Swedish films of Stieg Larsson’s global bestselling Girl With
the Dragon Tattoo books, and as archaeologist Dr Elizabeth Shaw in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus.
Sipping green tea and applying roll-on perfume to her neck as we speak, Rapace couldn’t seem further away from her characters. The 39-year-old is wearing a silver leather jacket with matching platform boots. Her hair is cropped and pink-tinged, held back with a pair of jewelencrusted sunglasses that mirror her diamond earrings. But Rapace, it turns out, has a fierce side.
Sam, her character in Close, is based on real British bodyguard Jacquie Davis, one of the world’s leading close protection officers, who has worked for JK Rowling, Bradley Cooper and members of international royal families. Davis has hailed the film as groundbreaking in choosing to depict a female bodyguard in such a male-dominated industry, and has said it gives an accurate insight into the “secret, private world” known by so few – comments that drew further intrigue this week when the Duchess of Sussex’s own female protection officer resigned after just six months in the post.
In preparation for the role, Rapace worked closely with Davis and undertook a six-week training course to immerse herself in “the Circuit”, as the bodyguarding world calls itself.
She learnt how “to follow, to spy, to protect, to look for threats”, as well as how to navigate the intimate relationship between protection officer and client – and how to react when they are in trouble.
“In my world, we actors are the ones who get attention; you step into the room and people look at you,” says Rapace. “What they do is invisible. They devote themselves, and live to protect someone else. It’s pretty magical in the times we live in, when there’s so much ego.”
In Davis, Rapace saw someone who was “insanely fierce and strong” with an “extreme work discipline”, but who also harboured “a sadness”.
“She’s seen a lot of s---; the dark side of humanity,” says Rapace. “And you’re isolated and detached from the world.”
That independence and ferocity chimed with Rapace, who left her family home – a remote Icelandic farm – at the age of 14 to live with her boyfriend in Sweden. She entered a “wild”, rebellious phase during which she drank heavily and put herself in dangerous situations – her nearest city was Malmö, where “the statistics for rape are insanely high”.
“I knew a lot of girls who had been raped,” she says. “Nothing happened to me, but I was aware of a potential sexual violence.”
To that end, Rapace trained in the martial arts. “I didn’t like feeling scared and like I couldn’t protect myself if something happened,” she says. “To be aware of your body as a woman and to find strength that isn’t based on how you look was liberating for me.”
It also equipped her with the ability to hold her own – in the theatre and beyond. “Every time I walked into a fight club or training studio I felt like I was equal [to the men there],” she says. “It was an environment that was very respectful.”
After the Metoo movement, the acting world no longer has the same reputation and, at the age of 20, Rapace had to fight off unwanted advances when she was performing in a play. It was, she admits, “like the actresses were a buffet”.
“There’s so much desperation in the acting world and a lot of people will do anything to get a part,” she says. “It’s dangerous.”
Rapace has “always been very stubborn” and refused to “play that game or become someone’s mistress”, but one director was obsessed with her. “I never gave myself to him, which provoked him so much,” she says. “He became really aggressive and angry. I just thought that was the way it was, because you saw so many situations like that around you.”
But “it was an early wake-up call”. Rapace now lives in north-west
‘As a woman, to find strength that isn’t based on how you look is liberating’
London with her sister and 15-yearold son Lev from her marriage to Swedish actor Ola Norell, which ended in 2011. On getting wed, the pair both took the surname Rapace – derived from the French for “bird of prey” because, she has previously admitted, they thought it sounded cool.
“I love London so much, I feel more at home here,” she says. “It feels really tolerant compared to Sweden, which is quite narrow-minded. From the outside it can look like it’s liberated, open-minded and equal, but deep down they don’t really embrace originality.
“They worship normal – and I’m so not normal.”
Recently, she had dinner with her friend Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, during which they discussed how he was challenging the stereotype of models in the magazine.
“He’s very supportive of a new era, I like that,” she says. “I walked out of that dinner happy. If everyone does what they can in their field it will slowly change.”
For Rapace, that means pushing for authenticity on screen by brushing away the make-up artist’s hand. “When I’m working I don’t care what I look like; vanity can never come before honesty,” she says. “If I’ve just woken up, why would I looked fixed and fresh? F--- me up.
“In my world, you have to fight for simple things.”