Noomi Rapace Previews ‘Intriguing’ Constellation (and the ‘Creepy’ Detail That Sold Her on Apple TV+ Drama)
Constellation star Noomi Rapace hopes that Apple TV+’s new(est) sci-fi series keeps you guessing with its mind-bending, out-of-this-world storytelling.
Created/written by Peter Harness (Wallander, The War of the Worlds) and premiering Wednesday, Feb. 21 (with its first three episodes), Constellation stars Rapace (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) as Jo, an astronaut for the European Space Agency who returns to Earth after a disastrous mission, only to to discover that pieces of her life seem… different.
The cast also boasts Jonathan Banks (Better Call Saul) as Henry, a physicist who has a member of Jo’s ESA team conducting research at the International Space Station; James D’Arcy (Agent Carter) as Jo’s husband Magnus; Rosie and Davina Coleman (The Larkins) as Jo and Magnus’ daughter Alice; plus William Catlett (Black Lightning), Julian Looman (The Mallorca Files) and Barbara Sukowa (The Swarm).
Is Constellation a sci-fi series? A psychological thriller? A conspiracy drama? Or is it something different? Or something more?
Having screened all eight, often-twisty episodes, TVLine asked Rapace how she herself has been describing her new project to those in her… orbit.
“Oh, I choose to not give too much away, because I want people to discover what it is on their own…,” Rapace hedged. “But I will talk from Jo’s perspective and say that it’s about an astronaut and mother who’s been trapped up in space and needs to bring herself back to Earth to reunite with her family, to come back to her daughter.
“But it’s not easy,” she previews. “She manages to do that and thinks that everything is OK, that she’s back to her life, but she’s not really. And then she has to figure out what’s going on.”
Jo’s recounting of a pivotal event on the International Space Station suggests to those back home that, at best, her memory has been compromised. Or, at worst, she has gone mad.
The very knotty mystery at the heart of Constellation is one of several things that drew Rapace to the eight-episode series.
For one, Rapace, who has a son, says that she was excited by the “motherhood, the human aspect” of the role. The “intriguing, complex and unexpected” writing was a second draw for the actress, laying the foundation as it does for something that is often intensely personal but also of a big scale. “It feels like a movie, it’s so cinematic,” she raves.
But perhaps most of all, “I love movies and series that allow me as an audience to stay alert and to keep on thinking, where the answers are not force-fed into my mouth,” she says. “When I go off and watch something and it’s like, “What was that? What did that mean?,’ it’s a great little mind game.”
One element that admittedly caught Rapace off-guard when reading the scripts is the fact that Jo and her daughter Alice sprinkle their conversations with (subtitled) Swedish — and Rapace is Swedish herself.
“When I read that, I was very surprised… and it was a bit creepy almost,” she recalls. “It felt like this surely must be written for me. And then I spoke to Peter Harness and [director] Michelle MacLaren, and it was like I’m meant to do this. I felt in my entire being that Jo and I are supposed to go on a journey.”
Said journey sometimes found Rapace strapped into an elaborate (and eventually very sweaty) harness to simulate the many “zero gravity” sequences in space, and at other times thrust her into a nighttime blizzard as Jo trekked back and forth across (don’t ask!) a frozen tundra.
Which of those literally uncomfortable scenarios proved the greatest challenge for the actress?
Without hesitation, she bristles at the latter.
“It was so cold, beyond cold, that it was painful,” Rapace reports of that specific Finland location shoot. “I’ll take heat and sweat any day!”
This definitely sounds intriguing and complex to decipher. As a sucker for mysteries and sci-fi when it’s involved, I’ll keep an eye out for this series.
Apple TV seems to be doing a lot of space stuff. I am going to need some Supernatural shows that don’t involve Space. That is why Netflix is still the best Streamer, they offer something for everyone. Don’t get me wrong I love some of Apple TV’s content, but they lack that one genre for me. I need something like Umbrella Academy, Irregulars, Etc something along those lines.