Performer of the Week: Noomi Rapace
THE PERFORMER | Noomi Rapace
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THE SHOW | Apple TV+’s Constellation
THE EPISODE | “The Left Hand of God” (Feb. 28, 2024)
THE PERFORMANCE | Ever since returning from her near-fatal mission aboard the ISS, astronaut Jo Ericsson had kept it together.
Had being the operative word.
As Constellation reached the midpoint of its season, Jo uncovered more clues, of increasing size, that something is askew with the world she came home to. Rapace in turn brilliantly ratcheted up the magnitude of Jo’s confusion, bit by bit.
Before things got too incredible, Jo processed some “everyday” surprises — including Magnus’ disclosure that, having sensed before her mission that their marriage was kaput, he met, and kissed, someone. Jo at first uttered but one word (“What?”), but Rapace’s expression spoke volumes about how this woman who had left behind a great marriage had been wildly blindsided.
Things were also relatable when Jo met with her shrink and recounted the incongruities before her. The family car is blue, not the red she remembers. The home has a piano, yet she doesn’t play. Oh, and she has been having visions (hallucinations?) of her dead colleague Paul. Rapace listed these plainly, but you could see in her eyes how the oddities were adding up for Jo.
Then things got weird. Jo doubled over from a blinding pain when near the CAL. She saw janitors enter her office to pack it up, yet they didn’t acknowledge her. In the middle of speaking before Alice’s class, Jo called out the teacher for being Magnus’ fling. (“Is it you…?” she said to the back of the classroom. “It it her…?”) And then the accident an increasingly agitated Jo nearly got the family into on the drive home.
When Jo discovered that night that Magnus had invited over her colleague/alleged paramour to discuss her dissociation, Rapace had us rapt as Jo struggled to make sense of it all, including Frederick’s own belief they were having an affair. “Honestly, I didn’t remember…. I don’t remember,” she insisted to Magnus. “Maybe this isn’t the same place I left?”
Capping Rapace’s showcase was an intense sequence in which Jo listened to some tapes mysteriously mailed to her by someone in Denmark, proving that someone was able to hear her desperate hails from the ISS. Rapace had us on edge as Jo accused Magnus of being in on a scheme to keep her suppressed with anti-psychotics. “I knew you could all hear me when I was up there! You were going to leave me up there to die!” she bellowed, before accidentally knocking Magnus down, cracking his head on a rail of the piano.
What is going on? We feel like we’re starting to put it together, and Rapace has us rooting for Jo to do same.
Scroll down to see who scored Honorable Mention shout-outs this week…
HONORABLE MENTION: Calista Flockhart
Ask us to name our poison, and this week, it could only be the erstwhile Ally McBeal. Though her appearance in Wednesday’s FEUD: Capote Vs. the Swans was brief, we inhaled it like secondhand smoke, and to hell with whether it was bad for us. All season, Flockhart has served Lee Radziwell over ice, presenting Jackie O’s sister as a toxic cocktail whose recipe calls for bitterness and envy in equal measure. In “Hats, Gloves and Effete Homosexuals,” the actress threw in an extra shot of venom as a chance encounter with former friend Truman Capote allowed her to take aim at his “cygnet in training.” Mocking the girl’s middle-aged-lady updo, Lee scoffed, “You’re not in the Daughters of the American Revolution.” Then, when Tru too desperately inquired about perhaps lunching with Lee, Flockhart taught a master class in bitchcraft, uttering two simple words — “Call me” — with such understated loathing that the “I dare you” was impossible to miss. —Charlie Mason
HONORABLE MENTION: Bobby Hogan
As a guest star on Chicago P.D., Bobby Hogan did so much with so few words of dialogue. Hogan — whose previous credits include episodes of NCIS: Los Angeles, FBI and 9-1-1: Lone Star — played Noah, the victim of a brutal assault and gruesome abduction. When Noah was eventually found, with his eyelids stapled open (among other injuries), Voight did his delicate-ish best to procure intel on the attacker. Noah, though, was deeply traumatized, to the point that he could barely look at Hank, let alone detail what he’d been through and at whose hand. There are stock ways to communicate trauma on a TV procedural, but Hogan dug deep and went all in. We felt Noah’s anguish, how what he had endured was literally unspeakable. Quivering lips and chin. Silent sobbing. A beet-red complexion. We winced, and begged Voight to step back. What Noah couldn’t tell us verbally, Hogan sold us on physically. — M.W.M.
HONORABLE MENTION: Ruth Wilson
Ruth Wilson saved the best for last in her remarkable turn as The Woman in the Wall‘s Lorna Brady, taking Lorna on a journey from all-consuming desperation to quiet hopefulness in Sunday’s finale. As Lorna’s search for her daughter reached its crescendo, Wilson was more magnetic than ever, especially in a heartbreaking scene at St. Alma’s where Lorna’s pursuit of her child reached a dead end. But Wilson’s quieter, more subtle choices were even more effective than her full-body sobs; we were particularly moved by Lorna’s phone call with Colman halfway through the episode, in which both characters gave each other some sense of closure, and even the slight tremble in Wilson’s voice and bottom lip was enough to crack our hearts into tiny pieces. —Rebecca Iannucci
Which performance(s) knocked your socks off this week? Tell us in the comments!
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