Will He/She . . . or Won’t He/She?

Will Daniel Craig return? Will Rooney Mara return? Will David Fincher return?

The guessing game about a sequel to Hollywood’s Girl with the Dragon Tattoo continues, afloat on a sea of speculation — informed, uninformed, half-formed, whatever. The latest twist (red-herring?) in this mini-saga comes from Mara herself, who told the entertainment press that she wants “in” and denied rumors that her hotter-than-ever co-star Daniel Craig doesn’t.

There has also been some speculation that if Craig is not available because of scheduling or money issues, Blomkvist could simply be pruned from the script. The rationale here is that The Girl Who Played with Fire is focused almost entirely on Salander. While we should never sell Hollywood short when it comes to torturing original material, it would seem highly unlikely in this case. The rumor mill forgets that our crusading journalist is indispensable to the book’s key plot points: the exposing of the human trafficking scandal, defending Salander to the police when she becomes a murder suspect, and rescuing her after her harrowing, bloody showdown with Niedermann and Zalachenko.

Two of the more “newsy” stories are the MTV.com report that includes the Fincher dimension and the AccessHollywood story that leans more toward “maybe” and ”I hope so”. We reprint the latter below.

Oh, well, something to distract us from the Sweden-like cold snap here in the Northeast. Why couldn’t we be bundled up with Larsson’s fourth book instead?

Rooney Mara: I ‘Hope’ To Make Dragon Tattoo Sequels; Actress Says Daniel Craig Also Game To Return

Vogue features Rooney Mara on its cover

Photograph by David Sims. Published in Vogue, February 2013.

The February issue of Vogue features a profile of actress Rooney Mara, who played Lisbeth Salander in the Hollywood/David Fincher version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie that debuted in December 2011. It’s a worthwhile character study of the Academy Award nominee.

The article opens with this word picture:

Before Rooney Mara was cast as Lisbeth Salander—the heroine of Stieg Larsson’s novels—the only thing edgy about her looks were her enviable cheekbones and piercing blue eyes. Her traditional beauty underscored her lineage: Born in 1985 in Bedford, a tiny suburb of New York, she is the great-granddaughter of the founders of both the Pittsburgh Steelers and the New York Giants. But her preparation for her role as the antisocial computer hacker in the Millennium trilogy consumed her. Her chestnut locks vanished beneath a sheet of black, razor-sharp hair; her ivory skin was made somehow paler; she was covered in piercings and tattoos; and her girlish softness was replaced by sinew and muscle….

Read more here.

Noomi Rapace and Niels Arden Oplev re-team for Dead Man Down

Alex Billington of FirstShowing.net reports on this gritty thriller, due in theaters in March, which reunites Noomi Rapace, the star of the three-part Scandinavian-made film series based on Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, with the trilogy’s Danish director,  Niels Arden Oplev. Excerpts from Billington’s report follow, with a link to the trailer:

An early trailer for FilmDistrict’s crime thriller Dead Man Down has surfaced…. Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace star in Dead Man Down, directed by Danish filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev who made the first original The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo film. It also co-stars Dominic Cooper, Terrence Howard, Isabelle Huppert and Armand Assante in a powerful portrait of the relationship between two people caught in the crosshairs of revenge. It has a bit of a Drive kind of vibe, so check it out yourself. Here’s the very first international trailer for Niels Arden Oplev’s Dead Man Down, found on YouTube.

Following the cinematic phenomenon The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, acclaimed filmmaker Niels Arden Oplev and brooding beauty Noomi Rapace reunite for another thrilling tale of vengeance. Colin Farrell joins the prestigious team as brave enforcer Victor, right hand man to an underground crime lord in New York. He seeks to avenge the death of his wife and daughter caused by his boss. When his employer is threatened by a mysterious killer, Victor also becomes detective. Victor is seduced and blackmailed by Beatrice (Noomi Rapace), a victim turned avenger whose intense chemistry leads them spiraling into payback delivered in violent catharsis.

The Who’s Pete Townshend: I am drawn to Scandinavian fiction

The New York Times recently interviewed Pete Townshend, star of the legendary rock band, The Who. Townshend, whose lyrics have always been among the most interesting in the rock ‘n roll genre,  also has a genuine literary side to his intellectual life and once worked as an editor at a British publishing house. In the interview, the NYT asked him about what he reads these days. After talking about his interest in Scandinavian fiction, he zeroed in on what he liked—and didn’t like—about Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy:

“The last in the Stieg Larsson Millennium trilogy was pretty bad. The first drew me in skillfully, and I adored it before I realized I was being suckered by a radical feminist man-hating man masquerading behind his vision of a society allegedly full of powerful men who all hate women. That said, I would have loved to see where Larsson went next. Tragic that he died so young, whirling in his own creative torment, Scandinavia’s literary Kurt Cobain.”

Flash! Lisbeth Salander Joins the Rolling Stones!

The Rolling Stones, who for decades have managed to make themselves relevant to the trends of the day, have done it again with their recently released video of their hit, “Doom and Gloom.” And it is so 2012: Zombies, environmental degradation (oil spills, fracking), random gun violence, echoes of “Occupy Wall Street,” the evils of junk food, and . . . that girl with the dragon tattoo.

In a brilliant bit of casting, the Stones chose Noomi Rapace (who starred as Lisbeth Salander in the three Scandinavian-made films based on Stieg Larsson’s books) as the lead for their video. There she is, front and center in full doom-and-gloom Lisbeth Salander mode, giving a performance surely informed by her own real-life history as a punk and rebel in her teens. (See more about Noomi Rapace’s background on p. 213 of our book, The Tattooed Girl: The Enigma of Stieg Larsson and the Secrets Behind the Most Compelling Thrillers of Our Time.)

Visual echoes of the movies abound. Among them an old abandoned factory, the way Noomi broods when she smokes, and the lighting of a fire–in this case of atomic proportions. And was that a stale, limpid slice of Billy’s Pan Pizza amid a gross-out pile of junk food? Also fun was the visual humor of “Lisbeth” standing in for various members of the band. “Holy Keith Richards, that’s not Mick Jagger, it’s Lisbeth Salander!” The Swedish music video director is Jonas Akerlund, who is best known for his work on Madonna’s music videos.

Don’t miss it: watch here.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo graphic novel trailer

In case you haven’t seen it yet, check out the trailer for the DC Comics graphic novel adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

What do you think of this adaptation, and the fact that they’ve made a trailer for it?

New York Times Magazine cover story brings memories of Ronald Niedermann

The New York Times Magazine devoted its cover story on November 18 to the struggle of Ashlyn Blocker, a teenage girl in Georgia who has a congenital condition that makes her insensitive to pain.

Congenital insensitivity to pain (also known as congenital analgesia), is an extremely rare medical condition. But Stieg Larsson was intrigued with it while he was writing the Millennium trilogy in 2001-2003—right around the time Ashlyn was a toddler and exhibited her first symptoms. Larsson decided to endow Zalachenko’s hatchet man, the giant Ronald Niedermann, with that characteristic and to create a number of plot points in The Girl Who Played with Fire that revolve around Niedermann’s insensitivity to pain. Here’s what we wrote about congenital analgesia in our 2011 book, The Tattooed Girl: The Enigma of Stieg Larsson and the Secrets Behind the Most Compelling Thrillers of Our Time: