Ola Rapace

Ola Rapace was born on 3 December 1971 in Tyresö, a suburb southeast of Stockholm, Sweden and named Pär Ola Norell. Both of his parents were academics. He grew up mainly in Vallentuna, a middle-class suburb north of Stockholm. When he was one year old, his parents separated, and he was raised by his father. He grew up playing football and listening to heavy metal.

While studying philosophy at the University of Montpellier in France, he discovered acting. His first screen role was in Lukas Moodysson's film Together, a bittersweet comedy about hippie-socialist values set in a Stockholm commune. The film won several awards at international film festivals, including the Paris Film Festival Special Jury Prize, and Philadelphia Film Festival Jury Award.

Rapace's big breakthrough came with the popular TV series Tusenbröder about a group of handymen who become involved with organised crime. Immediately followed the role as Stefan Lindman in Wallander, which was based on Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander books.

He continued with several police and crime-related TV series, including portraying Daniel Nordström in the Danish police TV show Anna Pihl, Crimes of Passion, a crime drama set in 1950's rural Sweden, Farang about a Scandinavian ex-convict living in Thailand and Hassel, an updated dark and gritty cop show based on a classic series of books from the '70s and '80s. This was a cop show he also executive produced, and Section Zéro, a French, science-fiction influenced drama.

While he has worked on many cop shows, Rapace has been very critical of the genre. In 2012 he told Cafe Magazine: "All the Wallander and Beck films are worthless. There is no credibility, it does not work to investigate thousands of murders in Ystad year after year. In the end, it becomes a joke, and the quality becomes so low that one has no other option but to shut down the production".

His first English-language film was the 2004 independent movie Rancid starring Matthew Settle (from Band of Brothers and Gossip Girl). A bigger project was the 2012 James Bond film Skyfall, where he portrayed the hitman "Patrice".

Rapace lived in Paris from 2015 to 2020 and has worked on Swedish, French and international projects. In 2016, he starred in the French science fiction film Ares and soon after followed Section Zéro, a French TV-series about a para-military police squad in the near future.

Rapace had a supporting role as Major Gibson in Luc Besson's 2017 French/American big budget comic book/science fiction film Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.

In 2018 Rapace was one of the main antagonists in series 3 of the drama The Last Kingdom as Jarl Sigurd Bloodhair.

Rapace joined the cast of Below the Surface (Gidseltagningen), a Danish drama about 15 innocent people held hostage underground in a subway train, as "Yusef" when it returned for a second series in 2019.

Rapace starred alongside Kellan Lutz in Divertimento, an English-language, French thriller that came out in 2020.

In August 2022 director Lukas Moodysson announced the start of a sequel to the movie Together and that the role of Lasse would not be portrayed by Ola Rapace as in the original film. Moodysson explained this was per request from SF Studios.

During September-October 2022, Rapace portrayed Mr. Y in August Strindberg's Pariah at Lövstad Castle Theatre.