![]() You have the right to take and to use your toolbox to fix yourself. I think there's a combination of when someone is in pain, you feel like you're being excused. I'm curious how you navigated the conflict of Maria being a woman who's at once very protective of her family and of being a mother but kills the lamb’s mother, who is trying to protect her own as well. ![]() Then you see she makes love and dances, and welcomes lives back in. She's squeezing herself out to enter life again and start to feel again. She has this hard shell in the beginning of the film, and then she gets this possibility to start healing-this gift, the happiness of Ada who arrives. I would almost say that Maria is going through the same process. They squeeze out of the old shell and are so vulnerable before this shell hardens yet again. It's an extremely painful process, and they force themselves out. Do you know that when lobsters outgrow their shell, they swim in or trap themselves between rocks, and then they force themselves out of the old shell? It’s like skin underneath really soft and tender. Yeah, because happiness and the possibility of healing is so fragile in the beginning. She even murders the lamb’s biological mother, which is certainly a primal, horrifying decision. She doesn't want Pétur, her brother-in-law, there. Maria is so protective of her child and untraditional family that she doesn’t want others around. And I visited a lot of old decisions and memories and things I thought I was done with. I came back to a core sense of myself as a human. This movie really peeled off a lot of layers of me. ![]() Then we just protect our nest, fill up with whatever is needed for our family, our babies. It's like, What is happening? We thought we were far ahead and actually well-behaved. Like, when there's some kind of catastrophe happening or like when the Coronavirus hit, and everyone started fighting over toilet paper. It takes any little thing to send us flying off the handle. I feel like we as humans, and especially being here in beautiful New York, we have all this technology and we're so civilized and sophisticated and then we're not actually at all. It's like your whole body is awake and you're ready for battle to protect your child. I could feel that same primal instinct of protecting my baby that hit me when my son was seven or eight come back. When the mother sheep is calling for her baby, in my head, it’s my baby. When Ada is born, that becomes the bridge from my grief-my emotional life that is on pause-and becomes the ticket out of it. There was a couple of times when we shot Lamb when I felt like Maria’s deeply rooted primal need to be a mother just overrides everything else. There was a moment when he was in school many years ago, someone was mean to him and I was like, “I’m going to…”. It's in those moments I feel like the animal in me just kicks in and I'm not rational anymore. The moments I felt the strongest were me being a mother. You’ve said, “We are all driven in our lives by our animal natures.” How did that ideology influence your interpretation of Maria and how you yourself navigate the world? Here, the actress reflects on how “slaughter time” and other experiences growing up on a farm shaped her views on mortality and motherhood, isolation as a means for justification, and finding freedom with Lamb. “It's in those moments I feel like the animal in me kicks in and I'm not rational anymore,” Rapace says. And likewise, for Rapace, it’s going beyond her moral compass to preserve what matters to her. Like the fact that both women act on inherently primal, shocking maternal urges.įor Maria, that means instinctually raising Ada, a lamb child, as her own with husband Ingvar ( Hilmir Snær Guðnason) and doing whatever it takes-even murder-to protect her new family. It’s not just the obvious things that tie together Rapace and Maria-both are mothers who have lived and raised animals on Icelandic farms-it’s what lies beneath that surface. It’s to the point where even today she sometimes says “me” or “my” when referring to Maria’s life and story. She connected with the character in ways she never quite anticipated going into the unsettling family drama (directed and co-written by Valdimar Jóhannsson along with screenwriter Sjón). ![]() Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
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