Alexan­der Skars­gård: ​‘I’ve always nur­tured this dream of look­ing at a great epic Viking movie’

When Alexan­der Skars­gård was a child, his fam­i­ly used to spend their sum­mers on the idyl­lic Baltic island of Öland. Sweden’s sec­ond-largest island is coin­ci­den­tal­ly home to their roy­al family’s sum­mer res­i­dence. In a man­ner, the Skars­gårds form a dynasty of their own, with patri­arch Stel­lan one of the most recog­nis­able Swedish actors of all time, and four of his eight chil­dren – Alexan­der, Gustaf, Bill and Val­ter – also pur­su­ing careers in film and tele­vi­sion. In fact, it was a friend of his father who gave Alexan­der his first act­ing role at the ten­der age of sev­en, in Åke and His World (he played Kalle Nubb, the epony­mous Åke’s best friend). But dur­ing his child­hood hol­i­days on Öland, he was more inter­est­ed in the rune­stones that lit­tered the island’s landscape.

“I remem­ber look­ing at those rune­stones, and the inscrip­tions were telling tales of Viking expe­di­tions down to Con­stan­tino­ple, and it just fas­ci­nat­ed me tremen­dous­ly,” he recalls
down the line from Stock­holm, where he’s spend­ing time with his fam­i­ly before embark­ing on the press tour for The North­man. ​“Since then I nur­tured this dream of one day look­ing at a great epic Viking movie.” With its ambi­tious scale and clas­sic tale of betray­al and revenge, The North­man is the prod­uct of that whim, but it wasn’t the most straight­for­ward path for Skars­gård to realise his sim­ple child­hood dream.

After play­ing the lead in a Swedish tele­vi­sion movie as a teenag­er (Hun­den som log aka The Dog That Smiled) Skars­gård found him­self uncom­fort­able with being in the pub­lic eye, and told his par­ents he didn’t want to act any­more. He stayed out of the spot­light for sev­en years, com­plet­ing his Swedish nation­al ser­vice and, even­tu­al­ly, mov­ing to Eng­land, where he attend­ed Leeds Met­ro­pol­i­tan Uni­ver­si­ty and stud­ied Eng­lish for six months. ​“I inten­tion­al­ly want­ed to go to Leeds because I want­ed the quin­tes­sen­tial British expe­ri­ence,” he explains. ​“A lot of my friends went to Lon­don, and I knew that if I were to go to Lon­don I’d end up hang­ing out with tons of Swedes. Leeds was chang­ing when I was there but it was quite a provin­cial town 20 years ago, and that was some­thing I want­ed. I didn’t want to go to a big cos­mopoli­tan city, I want­ed some­thing very British.”

Yet the act­ing world proved a draw once again, and after his time in Leeds, Skars­gård moved to New York to study the­atre. He returned to Stock­holm six months lat­er but his time study­ing had con­firmed that he want­ed to pur­sue a career in in front of the cam­era. Var­i­ous roles in Swedish film and tele­vi­sion fol­lowed, plus one scene-steal­ing small part as dim-wit­ted super­mod­el Meekus in Ben Stiller’s Zoolan­der, who per­ish­es in a gaso­line fight explosion.

It was in 2007 that Skars­gård was cast in HBO’s Gen­er­a­tion Kill, a dra­mat­ic mini-series about the 2003 inva­sion of Iraq, based on the book of the same name by reporter Evan Wright, who spent time embed­ded with the US Marine Corps. He played Staff Sergeant Brad ​‘The Ice­man’ Col­bert: a tow­er­ing, inscrutable sol­dier admired by his con­tem­po­raries for dis­play­ing calm under pres­sure. Skars­gård was a nat­ur­al fit: his Col­bert is the lynch­pin that holds the unit togeth­er, and his coy, almost unknow­able screen pres­ence keeps the audi­ence at bay, though nev­er to the show’s detri­ment. Instead we gain a sense of the strange­ness of being a man at war, lit­er­al­ly respon­si­ble for the lives of oth­ers, work­ing under the con­straints of a régime that nev­er should have put sol­diers in the Mid­dle East to begin with. Gen­er­a­tion Kill only appears more har­row­ing in the rearview, some 15 years after it first broad­cast, know­ing so lit­tle has changed about Amer­i­can (and, to an extent, British) geopo­lit­i­cal rhetoric. But Skarsgård’s per­for­mance as a man try­ing to do his job in the most impos­si­ble of sit­u­a­tions still shines – it remains one of pop culture’s endur­ing reminders that war is a mun­dane, machis­mo-infused hell.

Yet it was anoth­er HBO series which tru­ly cat­a­pult­ed Skars­gård to star­dom: Alan Ball’s lusty vam­pire saga True Blood, in which Skars­gård played the Viking Vam­pire prince Eric North­man. ​“When we shot flash­backs on True Blood, when Eric was human dur­ing the Viking age, those were some of the high­lights of the entire series for me. I had such an incred­i­ble time,” Skars­gård recalls. He quick­ly became a fan favourite, owing in no small part to Northman’s sar­don­ic sense of humour and ruth­less cun­ning. Sev­en sea­sons of blood- suck­ing hijinks fol­lowed, along with a strong fan­base online and offline (Skars­gård was a main­stay at San Diego Com­ic-Con dur­ing the height of its pow­ers). This makes The North­man the sec­ond time he’s played a Viking prince (it’s worth not­ing his Dan­ish co-star, Claes Bang, played Drac­u­la in the BBC’s 2020 minis­eries). Is there some sort of Scan­di­na­vian rite-of- pas­sage which requires their act­ing exports to play vikings and vam­pires at some point in their career? ​“Those are the two box­es you have to check and then you can retire as a Scan­di­na­vian actor,” Skars­gård laughs. ​“Vam­pire and Viking. Prefer­ably both at the same time as I did on True Blood. The grand slam.”

Skarsgård’s North­man is a pleas­ing con­trast from True Blood’s more dour cen­tral vam­pir­ic pres­ence, Bill Comp­ton, although the two main­tain an uneasy alliance through­out the show. For Skars­gård, it was a lot of fake blood and real nudi­ty. ​“I’m still try­ing to wrap my head around the fact that there’s no prob­lem with vio­lence, but I have to sign these legal doc­u­ments if I show my ass on screen,” he told Newsweek in 2009, pri­or to the third series of True Blood air­ing. ​“It’s real­ly not like that in Europe.” Despite his Hol­ly­wood star ris­ing with the vam­pire boom and his short-but-sweet cameo in Lady Gaga’s ​‘Paparazzi’ music video, Skars­gård con­tin­ued pur­su­ing inter­est­ing roles in off-kil­ter films. Dur­ing a week­end off film­ing Gen­er­a­tion Kill in Namib­ia, he returned to Swe­den to lend his voice to Tarik Saleh’s inven­tive sci-fi ani­ma­tion Metropia, and in 2011 played a sup­port­ing role in Lars von Trier’s Melan­cho­lia, a haunt­ing por­trait of depres­sion amid the impend­ing apocalypse.

Skarsgård’s taste for select­ing a mix­ture of high-pro­file and more left-field roles has qui­et­ly made him one of cinema’s most intrigu­ing per­form­ers, and he has a par­tic­u­lar­ly sharp eye for tal­ent­ed direc­tors, as demon­strat­ed by the two films he made in 2015: the Duf­fer Broth­ers would go on to cre­ate Netflix’s smash hit Stranger Things, but first Skars­gård starred in their pre­scient pan­dem­ic thriller Hid­den, and while Marielle Heller pulled in big names for her biopics Can You Ever For­give Me? and A Beau­ti­ful Day in the Neigh­bor­hood, her debut The Diary of a Teenage Girl – in which Skars­gård plays the lech­er­ous Mon­roe Ruther­ford, who begins a rela­tion­ship with his girlfriend’s teenage daugh­ter – remains an under­seen masterpiece.

Mov­ing flu­id­ly between por­tray­ing arche­typ­al heroes (The Leg­end of Tarzan) charm­ing dirt­balls and out­right psy­chopaths (Straw Dogs, Hold the Dark) is no small feat, though Skars­gård makes it look easy. His fil­mog­ra­phy stretch­es an impres­sive range of gen­res, and in 2018 he received an Emmy, Gold­en Globe, and Screen Actors’ Guild award for his por­tray­al of Per­ry Wright, men­ac­ing, abu­sive hus­band to Nicole Kidman’s Celeste Wright in David E Kelley’s tele­vi­sion series Big Lit­tle Lies (amus­ing­ly, and per­haps telling of Hol­ly­wood aging stan­dards, Kid­man now plays Skarsgård’s moth­er in The North­man). Where oth­ers might decry the chang­ing shape of the enter­tain­ment land­scape, Skars­gård remains optimistic.

“The land­scape has shift­ed in the past cou­ple of years and it’s veered more towards exclu­sive IP and big fran­chis­es and spin-offs and sequels and remakes, but I’ve been very for­tu­nate,” he says. ​“Tele­vi­sion today is much more inter­est­ing than it was 30 years ago, so the fact is that we can oscil­late between tele­vi­sion and movies in a way that was a bit trick­i­er a cou­ple of decades ago, when you were either a tele­vi­sion actor or a movie actor. The tal­ent behind the cam­era in tele­vi­sion is just phe­nom­e­nal. There’s always bil­lions of stream­ing ser­vices, there’s so much con­tent out there that I find it quite an excit­ing time to be an actor, to be hon­est. It’s dif­fi­cult for mid-range movies, if they’re around $20 – 30 mil­lion, to get made today, because the moviego­ing expe­ri­ence has gone a bit more towards a big tent­pole experience.”

It’s undoubt­ed­ly Skarsgård’s prag­mat­ic approach to the indus­try that has sus­tained his career for three decades. Not to men­tion his ver­sa­til­i­ty, which saw him por­tray a men­ac­ing racist hus­band in Rebec­ca Hall’s Pass­ing and a mild-man­nered geol­o­gist in Godzil­la vs Kong in the same year. But The North­man is a pas­sion project, with Skars­gård serv­ing as pro­duc­er and exec­u­tive pro­duc­er. The cul­mi­na­tion of a life­time spent eking out a career play­ing dif­fi­cult, often out­right unlike­able char­ac­ters, Prince Amleth is a hero, yes (Shake­speare nicked the sto­ry for ​‘Ham­let’), but in true Skars­går­dian fash­ion, it’s nev­er quite that sim­ple. He’s also a bat­tle-hard­ened Berserk­er, who will stop at noth­ing to wreak vengeance on those who destroyed his family.

It seems like a nat­ur­al fit for writer/​director Robert Eggers, then, with two sim­i­lar­ly strange and poet­ic films under his belt in The Witch and The Light­house. Eggers came to the project through a hap­py acci­dent. ​“I teamed up with Lars Knud­sen, the pro­duc­er who is also a fel­low Scan­di­na­vian, he’s from Den­mark. We had the inten­tion of mak­ing an authen­tic Viking epic, and we were bounc­ing around ideas, but around that time I had a meet­ing with Rob regard­ing anoth­er project,” he explains. After that came Sjón – Eggers’ co-writer – the Ice­landic author, poet and musi­cian who also co-wrote 2021’s Lamb with Valdimar Jóhanns­son. ​“I was very excit­ed about it being an Amer­i­can movie with a Scan­di­na­vian team behind it,” Skars­gård reflects. ​“Lars being Dan­ish, myself being Swedish and Sjon being Ice­landic – it was so impor­tant to have an author who under­stood the culture.”

The North­man gave Skars­gård and co the chance to cre­ate some­thing they hadn’t seen before in Hol­ly­wood: a Viking epic on the scale of Spar­ta­cus or Glad­i­a­tor, but one that blurs the line between myth and real­i­ty. ​“To each of the char­ac­ters a thou­sand years ago, the gods were as real as the horse we were sit­ting on, or the trolls in the for­est, the Norms that would lead the fate of men. It wasn’t a choice to believe. We tried to cap­ture in the movie that these super­nat­ur­al ele­ments are all, in the minds of these char­ac­ters, com­plete­ly real.”

This tracks, giv­en the lack of dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion between super­nat­ur­al and nat­ur­al in Eggers’ past work: mer­maids, witch­es and talk­ing goats are all pre­sent­ed as fact. As to why the Vikings’ pop­u­lar­i­ty endures after all these years, Skars­gård has some the­o­ries: ​“They were such intre­pid explor­ers who went into the unknown, they came across oceans a thou­sand years ago into for­eign lands with no idea what lay beyond the hori­zon. In Norse mythol­o­gy, the gods are fal­li­ble. They’re trick­sters and they’re not omnipo­tent, which makes them more relatable.”

Skars­gård could just as eas­i­ly be talk­ing about many of the char­ac­ters he’s played, who are steeped in flaws and oscil­late between charm­ing and men­ac­ing on a moment’s notice. But The North­man – in trib­ute to the home­land he loves and the craft he once thought he should walk away from – rep­re­sents some­thing tru­ly spe­cial with­in his body of work. Amleth, wronged Viking prince, will have his vengeance – and Skars­gård will reap the rewards.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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