EXCLUSIVE: Noomi Rapace is not one to shy away from a challenge. The Swedish actor has long been unafraid to tackle roles that are physically and e
EXCLUSIVE: Noomi Rapace is not one to shy away from a challenge. The Swedish actor has long been unafraid to tackle roles that are physically and emotionally demanding – whether it be her through her raw breakthrough performance in 2007’s Daisy Diamond, where she plays a troubled teenage mother who becomes a sex worker, to her role as the original Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Millennium series, to her critically acclaimed performance in 2021 Icelandic thriller Lamb.
For her latest act, Rapace is upping the ante in Teona Strugar Mitevska’s English-language debut Mother, which sees her step into the role of Mother Teresa. The film, which opens the Venice Film Festival’s Horizons (Orizzonti) section on Wednesday, is a multi-layered story that explores the revered and yet flawed Catholic icon and the titular role may be, says Rapace, one of her most complicated characters to date.
“I like a challenging place,” she tells Deadline in advance of the film’s world premiere. “I’ve gone through some of these transformative faces and characters that have had a huge impact on me and have really challenged me, and I would definitely say that Mother Teresa is one of them. I went to places in myself that were, on some days, very uncomfortable to be with and very intense.”
It’s an ambitious project for North Macedonian filmmaker Mitevska, who had been fascinated with the complexities of Mother Teresa for a number of years. Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu in the Macedonian capital of Skopje, Mother Teresa has long been lauded for her compassion and tireless work in aiding the infirmed. While she eventually earned a Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work before being canonized as a saint in 2016, her life was not without controversy, with critics accusing her of offering substandard medical care, baptising the dying and being fraudulent with funds.
“She was a person that carried a lot of pain but also probably was not consistent,” admits Rapace. “There were probably different rules for her than for others. She said, ‘If I ever become a Saint – I will surely be one of darkness’, and it was really because she walked the dark corridors of her own soul.”
Mounting a film about such an iconic religious figure comes with its challenges but Mother chooses not to go down the biopic route and instead focuses on a brief period of Mother Teresa’s life in 1948. The film examines seven crucial days in the lead up to when she leaves the Loreto Entally convent in Calcutta to launch her own Missionaries of Charity, a religious order dedicated to serving the poorest and most marginalized communities. Just when everything seems ready, she finds herself faced with a dilemma that questions her own ambitions and faith at a major turning point in her life.
“She was waiting for permission from the Vatican to be able to go out on her mission and she wrote letters to them for seven years to get permission to start Missionaries of Charity, a whole movement where she could leave the convent, leave the nun life and work outside of the walls,” says Rapace. “And she got more and more frustrated. She thought that they weren’t doing enough.”
She continues: “She was definitely a pioneer in her time, and she was fighting for something. But in our movie, we’re also looking at what is ego and what is her wanting to be seen and heard? What is love for others and what is her wanting to do more?”
Rapace, who is also an executive producer on Mother, says she had “the most incredible collaboration” working with Mitevska, whose last feature The Happiest Man in the World was also presented at Venice’s Orizzonti section. The writer-director had been ruminating on Mother Teresa as a subject for a film for a long time. “She’s been sitting on this for so long and processing,” says Rapace. “I don’t think she was ready for it until now. I think Mother Teresa was actually already in her body before her previous few films.”
Noomi Rapace as Mother Teresa in ‘Mother’
The pair worked from an early stage together on the script, agonizing over “the entrance” to this convoluted figure. From the outset, writers Mitevska, Goce Smilevski and Elma Tataragić were keen to convey a layered story that addressed issues surrounding power, ambition and gender roles.
“We wanted to go in and do our version of her,” says Rapace. “We’re not saying it’s the truth, but she had a lot of darkness in her. She said often in her letters that she was struggling with her faith and that she couldn’t connect with God and didn’t hear his voice anymore.”
Mitevska, who has often put a spotlight on mighty, female characters throughout her work, is described by Rapace as a “true feminist” and the film looks at Mother Teresa through a lens of a woman operating within the larger confines of a male-run global organization.
“Teona sees beauty where no one else sees beauty,” she says. “It was so liberating to be on her set. Mother Teresa was really hard on herself – harder on herself than many others I think – because she was on a mission. If you look at any leader or CEO today, anyone pushing through and starting something new, they have to have a certain degree of this. I wonder if she would have been looked at differently if she was a man.”
Rapace had six months of prep for the role and was forced to simultaneously prep for her starring role in Agnieszka Smoczynska’s sci-fi thriller Hot Spot, as the two films were set to shoot back-to-back. “It was almost like two realities,” recalls Rapace. “The characters were believers and religious in two completely different ways but were connected. It would have been too tricky to do both otherwise.”
For Mother, she immersed herself in Mother Teresa’s many letters, allowing her to construct her own version of the tardy saint. “There was connecting tissue that I could find: The self-doubt, coming from a place of carrying pain and seeking love or forgiveness or redemption.” She also did a lot of research on 1940s India, and read the Bible and the Quran in order to fully understand Mother Teresa’s world.
Mother also stars Sylvia Hoeks, Nikola Ristanovski, Ekin Corapci, Marijke Pinoy and Labina Mitevska, the latter of whom is also the producer of the film and sister to Teona. Sebastien Delloye also produces the Belgian-North Macedonian-Swedish-Danish-Bosnian co-production, which shot tardy last year in Belgium and Calcutta, India. Shooting at the latter location, admits Rapace, was a “shocking and intense” experience for the actor, who had only visited Mumbai briefly during a press tour many years ago.
“Walking the same streets that she walked and being in her world was a shocking thing to the system,” says Rapace. “I have never experienced anything like it. We’re so disconnected from that side of the world, and it was very intense. While we were out there, I felt I was going through this crazy ordeal of peeling off layers and layers of myself. There’s a scene in the movie when I cut all of my hair off, but I was basically just shaving off the last layer of something. On the last week of the shoot, I was crying. It was like I had no protection up anymore and it was very intense.”
She continues: “It’s going to be interesting to see how this movie lands. I think that we’ve put the spotlight on her without saying what is good or bad. I feel like I was trying to put my truth and give her life through my body, my brain and my thoughts. It’s sort of me marching right into her.”
Mother opens the Venice Horizons section on August 27, 2025.
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