Rebecca Ferguson interview: on The Snowman, Mission: Impossible, and the mystique of Scandi noir

‘I guess it can become a niche playing strong women’

‘I don’t like highlighting one film and saying this took me into the world I am in today but, no, I would not be where I am now had it not been for Ilsa and Mission’, says Ferguson

There’s a quiet resilience to Rebecca Ferguson. Never overstated, but grounded nonetheless.

First breaking out on the scene with the BBC’s The White Queen, where she played Elizabeth Woodville, Queen consort to Edward IV, Ferguson brushed off the destiny faced by many a fellow period actress: she would not be trapped in corsets, wilting over a series of dashing lovers, but a scientist (Life) and a spy (Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation). Indeed, as Rogue Nation’s Ilsa Faust, Ferguson achieved the remarkable: sharing a film’s frame with Tom Cruise, and yet still emerging as its heart and soul.

Not that it was a path easily won for the actor. “I was offered some roles that were quite similar,” she notes of her time after The White Queen. “I did Hercules, where I played a princess. I had an offer to play a countess of Borghese in Italy and I thought, ‘Woah, woah. Slow down. We’re working ourselves down. We’re going to end up a slave girl soon.’”

She’s quick to credit the team around her – “all individual thinkers, brilliant minds” – for shaping her gallery of fascinating, empowered women. But there’s another pitfall to be found there too, and there’s a clear conflict in her tone when she discusses the kinds of role she seeks out.

“I guess it can become a niche doing strong characters,” she admits. “It’s very hard, but also, God, what an honour that I’m playing strong women, or maybe that I’m making them strong because I find it much more fun to play.”

However, it could be, precisely, Ferguson’s own level of self-examination on the subject that’s become the secret to her success. Ilsa Faust was such a hit with audiences because she refused to rest on any tired trope: she could be powerful and conflicted, enigmatic but layered in her emotions.

“It was absolutely remarkable,” Ferguson says of the reaction to her character. “I don’t like highlighting one film and saying this took me into the world I am in today but, no, I would not be where I am now had it not been for Ilsa and Mission.

“And one of the most beautiful things was that it was written and produced by mostly men, and I was on set mostly surrounded by men, but I never felt like a woman amongst men,” she adds. “I felt like a person amongst other human beings. And I felt that I was given the most incredible introduction scene, and I was given equally as many cool fighting sequences. And Tom backed away and really gave me the light and something to work with. And that is fantastic, and I’m forever grateful for that.”

For now, Ferguson plays something (relatively) close to home, starring in Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman, adapting one of the books in Jo Nesbø ’s own Harry Hole series. A project, certainly, that’s flourished within our obsession over Scandi noir, all criminal procedurals marked by eerie, sombre moods and bleak, Nordic landscapes. Ferguson, who grew up in Sweden, though with an English parent, seems perfectly primed to offer some insight on the craze.

Rebecca Ferguson as Katrine Bratt in ‘The Snowman’

“I think things become highlighted,” she offers. “It’s like when Amélie from Montmartre came out and everyone was interested in the French films and the colours – it was green, it was red, and it was beautiful.” For her, the trigger was certainly Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, though she notes, “it’s always been there”.

“We’ve always had our foot in,” she adds. “But someone opened the door and it just became a wave, and we all got our films out. And it’s a stream of them.” Certainly, television has played its part here, where lower budgets demand spectacles apart from the usual Hollywood fare. Though perhaps to its own advantage, as Ferguson notes: “Maybe we have been a little exposed to high drama and explosions, and this becomes a little bit more exotic.”

The spectacle, instead, finds itself rooted in its own secrecy, within the lives of its characters or the endless landscape around them. “I think what we do well is we have such incredible milieus and surroundings,” Ferguson adds. “In The Snowman, you have such a vivid and bubbling city that is cocooned by nothingness, which is just the fjords and the mountains. And I think what a lot of people do in these Scandinavian films is they make these serene, beautiful milieux a character. And that becomes a shape, an energy in itself which can either become, like in our film, very threatening, or beautiful and spiritual.”

The Snowman, then, is intriguing in taking a trend so at home on television and sprinkling in a pure Hollywood twist. Harry Hole is here played by Michael Fassbender, with Ferguson as Katrine Bratt, a young but promising recruit who joins the investigation attempting to track down a killer targeting women, particularly sinister in his deadly signature: always during snowfall, with a snowman left behind at the scene of the crime. Elsewhere, the cast is primed with recognisable faces: JK Simmons, Chloë Sevigny and Charlotte Gainsbourg all star.

But to Ferguson, the project “felt small, and it felt domestic and homey”, not the impressive beast of a vehicle its star power implies. “And I don’t know if it’s because we spoke a lot of Swedish, or because the environment, that was so cold, asked of us all to be quite close together.”

“We’d be filming on set, but then everyone sort of gathers up in the little cottage, and the fire’s on, and the hot chocolate’s bubbling and Michael’s reading a book on a sofa,” she describes. “I’m doing something in a chair, and it becomes much more of a closed environment. If you break it down, yeah, we have JK Simmons from America, we have David Dencik from Denmark, we have Norwegian actors, and Swedish, but you kind of erase the geographical lines and it doesn’t really matter. And that’s kind of beautiful in film, that we can do that.”

The project, also, offered Ferguson a chance to work with Alfredson, beloved in Sweden thanks to his vampiric love story Let the Right One In. And in Katrine, exactly the kind of fascinating, layered character she’s built her career on.

Transferring from Bergen to Oslo, her hopes of landing herself a mentor in the brilliant, celebrated Harry Hole fall short; in truth, he’s a deeply troubled man consumed by his own demons. Katrine, too, has something to hide. Secrets upon secrets, leading the pair to become enthralled in a strange, psychological dance. “We’re constantly studying each other, like two cats circling each other,” Ferguson describes.

“She feels a connection to Harry and she probably doesn’t really know why she feels this connection to him,” she continues. “And I think that’s beautiful, what Michael did, was when we did these scenes where we would study a case or we’d go into a room, he would study her studying the room. And I think his character recognised himself in her ambition and in her drive, but he couldn’t really reach her, because she’s carrying so much – so many secrets.”

Ferguson is currently in London filming Mission: Impossible 6, after a brief sojourn to allow Tom Cruise to recover from his well-publicised injury. Not only is her Ilsa Faust set to return, but she’ll be joined by Michelle Monaghan (“She’s awesome. She is so funny and quirky and smart,” she enthuses), who plays Ethan Hunt’s wife Julia Meade; alongside The Crown’s Vanessa Kirby and Angela Bassett. “Not only one woman, we’re four women now,” she beams.

Rebecca Ferguson as Jenny Lind in ‘The Greatest Showman’

All shot, concurrently, with Joe Cornish’s The Kid Who Will Be King, an Arthurian fantasy that sees her as the wicked Morgana – or as she puts it, “Weekdays Mission, weekends Morgana.” It’s a feat she’s never attempted before, but the challenge is certainly worth it: “I read this script and I met Joe, and I just fell madly in love with it. And I had never done a character that turns into a dragon. And I’ll be doing magic! I’ve always wanted to do Harry Potter.”

Indeed, Ferguson’s resilience has a daring to it, too. She’s an actor with a healthy disdain for the comfortable – she mentions several times the abhorrence of letting things become “boring” – and so launched without hesitation into the Mission: Impossible’s stunts, or into the shoes of legendary Swedish opera singer Jenny Lind for The Greatest Showman, out later this year. As a musical based on the life of circus mogul PT Barnum, with an original score by La La Land’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, she was, of course, offered the chance simply to lip sync her way through the role.

But Ferguson declined. Instead, she trained rigorously for a month to deliver her own performance, which will then be blended together with the work of a professional opera singer. She’s unsure how much of her own voice will end up in the finished film, but the importance wasn’t in the results.

She says, “I thought to myself, I am going to stand there and I’m going to sing this song in front of 600 people and that’s what I’m going to do. It was nerve-wracking, but I did it.”

‘The Snowman’ is out now