EW has the first official look at the upcoming film The Secrets We Keep. Yes, there are films in 2020! The post-WWII revenge thriller stars Noomi Rapace, Joel Kinnaman, and Chris Messina. Directed by Yuval Adler, the movie tells the story about a Romani woman named Maja, played by Rapace. Maja is rebuilding her life with her husband (Messina), when Kinnaman’s character comes into their lives. Maja believes Kinnaman’s characters brutalized her family and her during the Holocaust. As a result, she kidnaps him in order to make him pay for the crimes she believes he’s committed.
For Rapace, the role of Maja seeped deep into her soul:
“When I first read the script, something just hit me and stayed in my heart about Maja’s fight for her own happiness and for healing. She just stayed with me. I couldn’t forget about her, I couldn’t put her away. She took a grip on my soul.”
Maja is “inspiring yet complex”, according to Rapace. Maja will struggle with her morality throughout the film. Rapace adds:
“Can you hurt someone who hurt you? Does revenge work? We meet her at a breaking point and that is for me as an actress such a great gift to go in and bring life to but also as the producer to tell the story about a woman who went through something so horrible 15 years ago and now is dealing with it. I’m almost obsessed with those subject matters – revenge, forgiveness, finding a way to heal things that were wrongly done to you, or emotional scars and trauma.”
Rapace also shares how each actor felt deeply affected by the script as they continued filming:
“We were emotional train wrecks to be honest,” she admits with a laugh. “[Kinnaman and I] had to open the door in ourselves to really unpleasant emotions. I’m holding him hostage in my basement. I’m putting him through a lot of extreme things. We went to those emotional places, and they become real so it was hard for us.”
Rapace and Kinnaman had went to high school together in Sweden. They also starred alongside each other in the film Child 44.
“I love him and he’s my friend, so that helped because he allowed me and embraced me when I went to those places that were quite scary,” she says. “You don’t really know what’s going to come out when you open the door to that chaos of pain and hate. It’s explosions of unresolved old wounds that Maja is opening up and that means me, Noomi, is doing the same. When you work with a friend that you trust, you can just go a little bit deeper because you have each other’s back.” She laughs again before adding: “It was painfully joyful.”
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