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Noomi Rapace Can Hold Her Breath a Really Long Time
When the magazine asks actors to turn a photo shoot into a performance, they usually hit their marks with gusto. In the recent past, for example, we have gotten to see Jessica Chastain start a fire with her eyes, Gary Oldman channel a demented ventriloquist’s dummy and James Franco kiss himself in the mirror. Now the actor Noomi Rapace joins their ranks by turning in her own delicate performance for this week’s cover. All she had to do was hold her breath in 733 gallons of water.
Our goal was to create an image with an otherworldly feel, in keeping with the sci-fi spectacle “Prometheus,” which stars Rapace and opens on June 8. Our magazine’s design director, Arem Duplessis — inspired by previous underwater pictures made by our chosen photographer, Olaf Blecker — suggested shooting Rapace in a tank of water.
Rapace said yes to the idea right away, so we guessed that she likes to swim. We didn’t know till the day of the shoot, however, that she has the lung capacity of a mermaid. She was able to stay submerged for what seemed like minutes at a time, and she managed to hold her breath in such a way that her face didn’t become distorted; her eyes were open, but did not bulge; her lips were slightly parted, but expelled no bubbles. She smiled, she laughed, she looked angry, contemplative, melancholy. Frankly, it was downright eerie.
Although Rapace didn’t beat the underwater time of the magician David Blaine (17 minutes, 4 seconds, on “Oprah,” in 2008) or the Swiss free-diver Peter Colat (21 minutes, 33 seconds, a world record set in 2011), we have to ask: Is either of them this beautiful?
6thfloor.blogs.nytimes via ontd
