Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist in "The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest".The Associated Press
Michael Nyqvist recently booked off shift as film hero Mikael Blomqvist by moving to Paris with his wife and three children. Now it's over to Daniel Craig, who will be playing Blomqvist, the fearless investigative journalist, in David Fincher's English adaptation of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, scheduled for release in 2011.
How does the Swedish actor feel about a gym-trim sex symbol in a three-piece suit playing a character he made famous as a white knight in black jeans?
Speaking on the phone from Paris, Nyqvist takes his time answering. "Curious," he says finally. "Like everyone else, I want to see what they do with it."
By everyone, Nyqvist means the 27 million readers (in 40 countries) who bought Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. Many readers followed the series into theatres. The first Swedish film adaptations are closing in on $200-million (U.S.) box office, worldwide, with more on the way. Hornets' Nest opens Friday.
The Millennium series is credited with helping keep the North American publishing industry alive postrecession. Hearing that, Nyqvist says he isn't surprised readers alarmed by corporate upheaval and government failures turned to Larsson's anguished take on modern Sweden.
"Swedes thought we had an open society, democratic socialism … everything works," he says. "Then we find out that there is a secret police we didn't know about. A prime minister is assassinated [Olof Palme in 1986] It's still a mystery. Journalists investigating the secret police are put in jail by bureaucrats. It was all very frightening, these discoveries."
In the Millennium trilogy, Larsson created a Bond-villain metaphor for an unfeeling corporate menace - a German superman who continues chasing down and will kill dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) in Hornets' Nest. Unless Mikael Blomqvist, her protector and occasional lover, foils his evil plan.
"When I first read the book, I think this huge killer with an illness that makes it impossible for him to feel pain, he is too much," Nyqvist says. "But, yeah, now I think he is a symbol. He is Big Bad Brother. Definitely."
Blomkvist and Salander, hero and heroine of the Millennium series, hide whatever pain they feel. They conceal their pleasure, too. Yet their chemistry, a telepathic empathy, electrifies the series. Nyqvist acknowledges that keeping their relationship alive on screen was a challenge given that, after the first film, the two driven loners are just that - alone. They share almost no scenes together, communicating electronically. Reaching out through USB keys instead of fingers.
"When I first met Noomi, we were in a film office and it was, 'Hi, how are you?' 'Very nice, thanks,'" Nyqvist says with a laugh. "We were to spend three years together creating these characters who do not really know each other. How could that work? We decided that we would get to know each other in front of the camera. No lunches or anything. You see our relationship develop as it happened."
Indeed, asked whether Rapace (pronounced Rapath), whose character throws off fumes like a Gothenburg refinery, smokes in real life, Nyqvist is at a loss. "I don't think so, but I'm not sure," he says.
Still, he says he knows both Lisbeth and Mikael. Why they're so driven. And so remote.
"We're Stieg Larsson," he says. The actor met Larsson in the 1990s when he was still an investigative journalist. "My character is like Stieg. His work is everything. He will work two weeks without eating properly. That's what happened to Stieg. He drove himself too hard."
The Writer Who Died Too Young succumbed to a coronary at age 50, in 2004.
Nyqvist knows the burden of an overburdened heart. He started life in a Stockholm orphanage in 1960. Growing up, he wanted to play hockey until a puck in the face led to a pre-adolescent retirement. (He continues following the sport, though, and counts former Maple Leaf Mats Sundin as a friend.) He later played football and started acting in Omaha, Neb., as a high-school exchange student. Returning to Sweden, he studied ballet before finding his salvation in theatre.
"Acting worked for me because I hate having my feet in the air," he explains. "In acting, I find the origin of a character. My feet are on the ground. I'm happy. After a while, I realized this drive to act is because, in real life, I didn't know who I was."
So at age 30 he set out to find his biographical parents, an experience he recounts in his recent book, Just After Dreaming. "It was liberating, even though your fantasies die," Nyqvist says. "I knew my father was Italian. I'm thinking someone like Marcello Mastroianni. Or Fellini." That only happens to heroes in movies, though.
"In real life," Nyqvist says, "what you find is that the great character you are looking for is just a nice man, a pharmacist in Florence."
Special to The Globe and Mail