Michael Nyqvist is best known (probably only known to most) as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist in the Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its subsequent sequels, the last of which, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest will be released this October and I just a few hours ago posted the latest trailer.
Well, like his Dragon Tattoo co-star, Noomi Rapace, who already landed a role as the female villain in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes 2, Nyqvist is finding Stateside love playing one of the lead villains in Paramount’s Mission: Impossible IV.
Nyqvist is the second international star to join the production in the past two days after Vladimir Mashkov was announced yesterday as landing a role as a Russian agent. Mashkov has had small roles in Behind Enemy Lines as well as “Alias” in the past and he is also featured in this year’s Russian Foreign Language Oscar submission, The Edge.
Nyqvist and Mashkov join Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Jeremy Renner and Paula Patton in the Brad Bird-directed feature, which is currently scouting locations in Vancouver, Prague and Dubai for a December 16, 2011. At this moment plot details have been kept quiet, but upon the casting of Renner it was thought he may prove to be a successor to Cruise’s Ethan Hunt should the franchise move forward to a fifth film without Cruise.
Unlike Rapace, Mission: Impossible 4 won’t be Nyqvist’s English-language debut. Only recently he was in Downloading Nancy and has a role, in fact, in John Singleton’s Abduction alongside Taylor Lautner, Lily Collins, Alfred Molina, Elisabeth Röhm, Maria Bello and Sigourney Weaver.
