She has also starred as Anna in Daisy Diamond (2007), Leena in Beyond (2010), Anna in The Monitor (2011), Madame Simza Heron in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), Elizabeth Shaw in Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), Beatrice in Dead Man Down (2013), Nadia in The Drop (2014), Raisa Demidova in Child 44 (2015), the seven lead roles in What Happened to Monday (2017), Leila in Bright (2017), Rupture (2016), Bianca Lind in Stockholm (2018), Sam Carlson in Close (2019), Lizzie in Angel of Mine (2019), Harriet Bauman in Jack Ryan (TV series, 2019), Maja in The Secrets We Keep (2020), Maria in Lamb (2021), Lisa in The Trip (2021), Bosilka in You Won't Be Alone (2022) and Caroline Edh in Black Crab (2022).

[12] In 1996, Rapace made her television debut playing the part of Lucinda Gonzales in the long-running soap series Tre kronor.

[15] In 2007, she won acclaim for her award-winning portrayal of a troubled teen mother in the Danish film Daisy Diamond, directed by Simon Staho.

All three films were subsequently recut as a six-part miniseries aired on Swedish television called Millennium, for which Rapace received a nomination for the International Emmy Award for Best Actress.

[21] Her first English-speaking role was the character of Madame Simza Heron in Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, released in 2011.

She was cast in Ridley Scott's blockbuster hit Prometheus, where she played the leading role, a scientist named Elizabeth Shaw.

She had met Scott for the first time following the release of the Millennium trilogy movies, at which point he expressed a willingness to work with her and encouraged her to improve her accent.

[25] In November 2012, she appeared in a Rolling Stones video for the single "Doom and Gloom", shot in the studios of the Cité du Cinéma by Luc Besson in Saint-Denis.

Rapace also appeared in Niels Arden Oplev's crime thriller Dead Man Down, alongside Isabelle Huppert and Colin Farrell.

In September 2014, she was the subject of the short film A Portrait of Noomi Rapace, directed by artist and designer Aitor Throup and scored by Flying Lotus.

She also starred in the spy thriller Unlocked, with Michael Douglas, John Malkovich, Orlando Bloom, and Toni Collette;[34] will lead the sci-fi/actioner Seven Sisters (released on Netflix under title "What Happened to Monday")[35] opposite Glenn Close and Willem Dafoe[36] and the sci-fi/thriller Rupture by Steven Shainberg.