The first sign that Claire Foy wanted to change things up in her career came at the start of 2018. Fresh from a second season of playing Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix’s period drama The Crown, the actor took a u-turn in Steven Soderbergh’s gritty, stripped-back iPhone-shot psycho-thriller Unsane. For her next move she’s heading deeper into the darkness as the third screen incarnation of Lisbeth Salander.
Stieg Larsson’s punk-hacker heroine is back in The Girl in the Spider’s Web — rather than following on from David Fincher’s critically-acclaimed but commercially-underwhelming Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Sony skipped to the fourth book written by David Lagercrantz in the wake of Larsson’s death. Fans got a first taste of Foy’s Salander in the film’s teaser trailer last week — and Empire has an exclusive new image.
It’s not only a different role for Foy, but a new take on the character — while the trailer sees Salander all mohawked-up and with a menacing white paint stripe across her face, this is the pierced, skin-inked heroine at her most casual. “As an actor, you’re very used to reincarnating roles,” Foy told Empire of tackling the part previously played by Noomi Rapace and Rooney Mara. “I’m from England; we do a lot of Shakespeare. I’m my version of Lisbeth Salander, which will inevitably be both different and similar. Either way, it’s a lovely club to join.”
Read more about The Girl in the Spider’s Web in the July issue of Empire, on sale in store and online now. The film is set for a UK cinema release on 9 November.
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