If Alexander Skarsgård were to write the book of his 40s so far, he says, he would give it the title Stale Mud and Dry Tears. The Stockholm-born actor, who is 46, has spent as many years as he cares to remember helping to realize an ambitious blockbuster about vikings called The Northman, which finally arrives in movie theaters this week. Over many trips to the gym in New York and in Stockholm (the two cities between which Skarsgård splits his time) he thickened his 6’ 3” physique to portray a hulking viking warrior. He had to maintain the extra weight and shape through months of pandemic delays, before a shoot that mostly took place on an open mountain-top in Ireland. The Northman's director Robert Eggers favors long, single-camera action shots — and Skarsgård, often near nude in the chill, caked in artificial blood and real filth, forever trying to remember which stuntman to pretend to murder next, was pushed to the limits of his endurance.
In the mid-2010s he had played another topless hero in a revival of Tarzan for Warner Bros. That shoot took place on a soundstage equipped with temperature and humidity controls. Making The Northman, the weather gods had the dial. “And they cranked it up to eleven,” Skarsgård remembers, “every single fucking day.” No wonder, when he comes into a restaurant near Regent's Park in London, the actor flops down almost horizontally on a cushioned sofa seat. Hardly rising to scan the menu, Skarsgård arranges himself Caesar-style: in full Roman recline. “We wrapped almost a year ago,'' he says. “But the experience still reverberates inside of me.”
He's dressed all in black today, from his Converse to a casual sweater to the shades he has hooked over his collar. The blonde hair is oiled and combed. His small, neat teeth are quick to flash in smiles of agreement or pleasure at a joke. In an American-accented English that's flavored with a lot of f-bombs, Skarsgård's conversation tends towards intelligent, slightly melancholy introspection. He says that while his 70-year-old father, the celebrated Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, “is still an energetic motherfucker,” he feels increasingly stiff in his 40s. “Physically stiff. Psychologically too.” How so, psychologically? “I'm stubborn,” says Skarsgård. “A creature of habit. I like life in a specific way.”
He doesn't have kids. Though there have been a string of girlfriends, he isn't married. Left to his own devices, without a movie or TV shoot to occupy him, Skarsgård says he likes to keep his days low on surprise. “I rarely venture outside my little neighborhoods in Stockholm or New York. Same spots. Same coffee shops. That Groundhog Day feeling is comforting to me, I guess. And not entirely unhealthy, I think, when you're used to working on far-flung sets.” He says he doesn't want to waste time deciding, this or that, right or left? “I like it frictionless. I like a streamlined day, to be like water going through. No decisions.”
Double-decker buses are circling nearby Regent's Park, bearing adverts for The Northman that quote a critic's gushing praise: “This generation's Gladiator,” the posters say. This is both true and not true. New Regency Productions, the studio that bankrolled Skarsgård's movie, is hoping for a Gladiator-level hit, because pandemic delays ratcheted up The Northman’s production budget to $90m and it needs to recoup. But the director, Eggers, who has a pair of modestly-budgeted psychological horror movies under his belt to date, brought to The Northman an arthouse sensibility. Morally compromised characters. Minimal audience hand-holds. The result is thrilling, an indelible visual spectacle and a fine showcase for the talents of Skarsgård and his co-stars including Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke and the Danish actor Claes Bang. The Northman is also violent, cruel, unrelenting, unfriendly and loud. At my screening in London, I overheard a sound technician complain to his colleague, “I can't get the volume down any further. I'm worried it's going to make people's ears bleed.”
In March, Skarsgård attended the movie's world premiere in Stockholm, joined there by his family and childhood friends. Skarsgård's sister arranged an after-party at the city's Viking Museum. He got drunk with his intimates between the longboats and the broadswords. As a producer on The Northman, Skarsgård had “been there since the genesis.” Now, as they celebrated in the museum, it was finally done. All this should have been cause for relief and pleasure, Skarsgård knows.
And yet, from his reclined position, he looks almost pained. As a counterweight to his friction-free way of thinking and living, Skarsgård says, “I sometimes have a hard time allowing myself to enjoy a moment. I'm not good at sitting and feeling that I've achieved something. In that regard, even though I've lived mostly abroad for 20 years, I'm very Swedish. We're like Brits. We're self-deprecating. In our internal monologue it's all, 'Ach! Don't wallow in this.' I'm trying to allow myself, with humility, to take more joy in my accomplishments.”
Skarsgård's accomplishments, in recent years, have included a reorientation of his career. For years in his 30s he was considered a talented beefcake, one of the sexy vampires from HBO's hit serial True Blood who afterwards tried his hand at being a Hollywood leading man. Popcorn action movies, including a 2012 flop, Battleship. Shirt-off photoshoots. The alpha-male effort culminated with 2016's The Legend of Tarzan, which just about made its money back at the box office and was widely trashed by critics. Skarsgård, having tried being a good guy, now did something different. He set about transforming himself into one of the more compelling and watchable bad guys of the era.
It started with a role he took after Tarzan, playing Nicole Kidman's abusive husband in the HBO drama Big Little Lies. “This guy wasn't a beer-on-the-couch wife-beater,” Skarsgård says. “You were allowed, as a viewer, to understand why it might have been difficult for Nicole's character to leave him.” Afterwards, he played a morally bankrupt racist in Rebecca Hall's 2021 movie Passing, and that year he joined the HBO drama Succession, as a sociopathic tech CEO who, from his villa on Lake Como, wreaks a casual havoc on the lives of the other characters.
Days after Skarsgård wrapped this show-stealing turn, he left Como for the ankle-deep Irish mud. Having worked together very well on Big Little Lies, Skarsgård and Nicole Kidman had promised to collaborate again, only the next time, they agreed, it should be on a production more light-hearted. Well, they managed to see through half of that agreement. When Skarsgård telephoned Kidman about The Northman (on which he and his collaborators hoped she would take the role of a viking queen and the mother to Skarsgård's character), “Nicole was probably expecting me to suggest a rom-com. And instead I'm, like, ‘Hey! Do you wanna play my incestuous mom?’” Happily for the new movie, which is most alive and disturbing when these two performers share the screen, Kidman was up for it.
His chicken sandwich arrives. Sitting up to bite, slumping again in the pauses as he chews, Skarsgård talks about his youth. He was in a few Swedish movies as a child, mainly doing favors for director friends of his dad. He served with his country's marines after school, traveled a bit, and wound up back in Stockholm as a 20-something barista. “Being stuck in Sweden felt like a failure in a way,” he says. His father Stellan had broken through in Hollywood, appearing as the professor whose chalk-boarded math riddle Matt Damon solves in Good Will Hunting (1997). Skarsgård went to visit his dad in LA and while he was there he auditioned, quite idly by the sounds of it, for 2001's Zoolander. When he got the part of a Scandinavian model, Meekus, he was one-for-one on the U.S. audition circuit. The years after were barren, though. “Didn't book a single job. There was a time when I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing? I came all the way from Stockholm to LA to sit on a casting couch, doing audition number 568…?’”
In 2007, HBO came to the rescue. Skarsgård was cast as a U.S. marine in David Simon's Generation Kill, and then, while he was filming that, he was invited in as a series regular on True Blood by its creator Alan Ball. “That ran for seven years. But I was still in a place where I wasn't getting many interesting or juicy characters to play.” Filming Tarzan, Skarsgård was over in the U.K. for about a year. He made another movie right after. Almost all of his possessions were in storage. “Living out of a suitcase all that time, it was eye-opening. I realized I never missed any of my shit. I didn't need 15 pairs of jeans. I didn't need a load of sneakers. I didn't need all these knick-knacks. When I got back, I gave away or sold most of the stuff in storage. It was liberating.”
This was the moment his job decisions became more liberated, too. Apparently unburdened by the need to be a traditional leading man, Skarsgård took on the darker, meaner roles that have defined this latest chapter of his career. “It might be related,” he nods. “There was another factor at play. I was getting older. And the older I got, the less I cared. I came out to Hollywood in my 20s. It was exhilarating and exciting but also demoralizing and humiliating. I was intimidated by the industry. You go into a restaurant and there are casting directors, people talking about the business, you're surrounded. Getting older, getting some physical and emotional distance from that, it was good for me. I just don't give as much of a fuck any more.”
Which brings us back to The Northman, in which Skarsgård presents us with his toughest hang of a character yet. The first time we meet him on screen he is rowing towards a village he will help swarm, pillage and burn. When a little boy is casually murdered we expect, as practiced cinema-goers, our hero to register some flicker of resistance or remorse. Skarsgård doesn't let the character flinch; as an actor, he no longer fears not flinching. Instead he goes on to participate in a massacre that leaves dozens more innocents dead. By the end of The Northman's first act, Gladiator starts to feel less a generational precursor, and more like one of those cartoons that warm up the audience before a Pixar movie.
“Funny you should mention the quote about it being ‘this generation's Gladiator,’” Skarsgård says, smiling slightly. “Rob [Eggers, the director] and I just had a conversation about that. We both felt that my moral journey in The Northman is, uh, pretty different from Russell Crowe's in Gladiator. But then we agreed, it's really not a bad way to sell a movie.” From his recline, Skarsgård offers a pragmatic, very Swedish shrug of submission — the shrug of somebody following a path of least resistance. “It's a fucking cool quote. So why fight it?”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Luc Coiffait
Grooming by Charley McEwan at Frank Agency