When Alexander Skarsgård was a boy, he would leave Stockholm every summer and journey to the house his great-grandfather built in Öland, a Swedish island on the Baltic Sea. His grandfather would take him around the island, teaching the young Skarsgård about the ancient rune stones—massive hunks of stone that Vikings inscribed to commemorate their dead—that jut out of the ground. 

“A thousand years ago, a Viking stood right here,” his grandfather would tell him. That’s when Skarsgård’s obsession with the storied Nordic warriors began. Like his father, Stellan Skarsgård, before him, Alexander would go on to become an actor, starring in films like The Legend of Tarzan and shows like Big Little Lies and True Blood, adept at playing multifaceted men who float between darkness and light. All the while, a fantasy project was blossoming in his mind. 

“I had this this dream of one day making a big, epic Viking movie, but based on an old Icelandic saga,” Skarsgård says over Zoom from a nondescript hotel room in Los Angeles, passionately recalling his early musings about a film that would authentically portray the fearless warriors whose adventures and myths ruled the landscape of his young imagination.

A few decades later and Skarsgård’s dream has finally become a reality with The Northman. Directed by Robert Eggers, the $90 million epic is a bloody and brutal adaptation of the saga of Amleth, a prince whose father is slain by his uncle. Amleth then spends the rest of his life becoming a ruthless Viking warrior and plotting his revenge, clawing toward the day he can finally face his uncle, avenge his father, and rescue his mother. Skarsgård skillfully portrays Amleth in the viciously entertaining film, layering the role with the warrior’s alter egos. There’s the wild-eyed bear-wolf who slaughters men in battle; the quick-thinking negotiator who learns how to move sneakily among traitors; and the gentle giant who pays keen attention to the wisdom of the women around him. It’s a subtle nod to the idea of “fylgja, a female spirit that lives inside of us and is guiding us,” Skarsgård explained, noting his fascination with the duality of testosterone-riddled Vikings believing in the female energy inherent within themselves. “That was something I wanted to explore…it is integral to him…and it’s subversive.”

Skarsgård could talk about this kind of thing forever, giddily going on long, unbroken tangents about concepts like hamingja (a warrior’s amount of luck going into battle), Viking theology, and his love of Old Norse names. When he was a kid, his parents let him pick his younger brothers’ middle names, and he always went the metal, Viking-approved route, picking names like Ymir, after the ancestor of giants, and Ormr, which means snake. “It took [Gus] years to forgive me,” Skarsgård says wryly of the latter name, “but he’s come to embrace it.” Like Alexander, most of his siblings—including It star Bill (Istvan Günther) Skarsgard—are actors.  

But of course, becoming a Viking wasn’t just a metaphysical endeavor. It was also an enormous physical undertaking, forcing Skarsgård to train like mad to get into proper shape. This wasn’t new for the actor. Prior to acting, he had served in the Swedish military. He’d also undergone physical transformations for films like The Legend of Tarzan and devoted himself to punishing escapades like a 208-mile charity trek to the South Pole with Prince Harry to raise awareness for Walking With the Wounded. But this time around, he needed to train to not only look the part, but also to get through the shoot, which had numerous fight sequences and which Eggers envisioned as being shot on real locations to best replicate the aesthetic and terrain of Amleth’s era. 

For the unfamiliar, the writer-director is a rigorous historian whose previous films The Witch and The Lighthouse were painstakingly researched period pieces. Eggers, who is American and whose previous films belie a historical American preoccupation, had been inspired to try something new after visiting Iceland for the first time and observing the rich, vast landscape of the country. It was around that time that Skarsgård took a meeting with him at Cafe Mogador in the East Village to discuss a different project when Skarsgård mentioned his idea for a Viking epic. “I felt he would be a dream director for our Viking project,” Skarsgård says of Eggers. “His attention to detail is just bar-none. It was absolutely extraordinary.”

Eggers went off and cowrote a script with Icelandic poet Sjón, and with Skarsgård on board as the producer and star, assembled a starry cast that includes Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman, Claes Bang, and The Lighthouse’s Willem Dafoe—who, along with The Witch star Anya Taylor-Joy, is now a regular player in the Eggers Cinematic Universe. 

Production took place primarily in Ireland and Iceland, with Eggers and cinematographer Jarin Blaschke relying heavily on one-take master shots that require precise choreography and repetition. It was ambitious and stylized, a bold way to tackle an epic of that nature.

The actual production itself was, in a word, “frustrating,” Skarsgård says with a laugh. “We’d never been on a set together before. I was obviously very familiar with his style of filmmaking theoretically, but I’d never worked that way.” 

At first, Skarsgård felt constricted by the choreographed nature of the film. “It’s like a straitjacket,” the actor says of the controlled shooting style. “Like, I want freedom. I want to explore. What if I don’t want to go left here? What if I feel like my character would do this?”

It took time to get into the flow of things, to accept that this was the way he had to work for the entirety of production. Skarsgård searched for freedom within his restrictions, reminding himself how much preparation had gone into the film and how much he had admired The Witch and The Lighthouse, ultimately choosing to trust Eggers’s vision. 

“The stuff he’s asking me to do doesn’t go against my beliefs in Amleth and who he is,” Skarsgård says. “It makes perfect sense. But it is very technical, so it’s more about trying to instill life into very technical scenes. That was the only way I could approach this, because otherwise it would’ve been a nightmare.”

Eggers’s disciplined style and Blaschke’s immersive cinematography result in some jaw-dropping shots. Take, for example, a magnificent raid scene where the Vikings storm through a village and kill everyone in their path. It’s continuous and several minutes long, with dozens of people and animals filling up the frame. “There are actors, stuntmen, extras, men falling off horses, chickens flying through the frame,” Skarsgård recalls. “Meanwhile, the camera is constantly moving.”

The film is laden with similarly tricky, visually impressive scenes, like a brutish lacrosse-style sports match that devolves into a bloody fight. The scene was shot “on very uneven ground up on a very remote location way up in the mountains,” Skarsgård says. But even though that scene was also planned in advance and highly choreographed, the production faced a setback when a flash flood washed the set down the mountain, forcing the crew to rebuild it again. At the time, it was a massive challenge. But in retrospect, Skarsgård is remarkably sanguine about that day, and the difficult nature of the film’s production overall. “I kind of love that shit,” he says. “I loved being out there. This is the type of movie you want to shoot in a remote location, where you’re knee-deep in mud. You don’t want to shoot this on a soundstage in Burbank.”

Skarsgård watched the film as it was being edited, but he didn’t really see the film until its recent premiere in Stockholm, his hometown. “That was my first time watching it on a big screen, completely finished, with an audience,” he says. It wasn’t just any audience, though. “It was an audience of my mom and my dad, my siblings, my best friends from childhood.” In other words, all the people who loved him most and who had listened to him dream about this idea for more than a decade, obsessing over the Viking lore that had embedded itself in his mind from childhood. 

“They loved it,” he says, relieved. “It’s been such a long journey.”  

— The “Hot Mess” Duchess at the Center of a ’60s Sex Scandal
— Justice for Girls: Looking Back on the Show 10 Years Later
— The Johnny Depp–Amber Heard Trial: How Did It Come to This?
— Amanda Seyfried Wants to Reprise Her Role as Elizabeth Holmes
— How the Cast of This Is Us Won Equal Pay
— Will Smith Banned From the Oscars for 10 Years After the Slap
— Netflix’s The Ultimatum Offers a Sadistic Twist on Reality Romance
— From the Archive: How David Zaslav Became America’s King of Content
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of “Awards Insider.”