BIG LITTLE HIGHS
By Stephanie Rafanelli
FROM A TORSO-BURSTING TARZAN TO NICOLE KIDMAN’S MANIPULATIVE ON-SCREEN HUSBAND, ALEXANDER SKARSGÅRD IS HAVING THE PROFESSIONAL TIME OF HIS LIFE. AS HE TELLS STEPHANIE RAFANELLI, HE IS A SELF-CONFESSED WOMAN’S MAN. AND, IT SEEMS, THE FEELING IS ENTIRELY MUTUAL
DURING THE SHOOT for Duncan Jones’ new noir sci-fi Mute, filmed in Berlin at the end of 2016, Alexander Skarsgård sampled the city’s smorgasbord of nightlife, often with his co-stars Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux. ‘One of the best ones was a hot chocolate rave at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon,’ he tells me, rhythmically flashing his eyes wider, as if to the pulse of strobe lights (this is just one of his eccentric tics). ‘To get in, you first had to be “cleansed” by this woman with a feather… It was in some industrial warehouse – the only thing they served was hot chocolate, and there were five-year-old kids and their grandmothers on the dance floor. I was like, “Wow, this is totally crazy. I’ve never experienced anything like this before.”’
It is not easy to elicit a ‘wow’ from Skarsgård. As the eldest of eight children born to Swedish hippies – his father is actor Stellan Skarsgård, the esteemed muse of arthouse director Lars Von Trier, while his younger brothers Gustaf, Bill and Valter are all rising screen stars – he has seen a few ‘crazy’ things in his 41 years. But he has cause for exclamation of late. His most recent wow moment was a kiss from Dolly Parton – to date, ‘the best kiss of my life’. This took place at last year’s Emmys, when she and her co-stars in his favourite girl-power film 9 To 5, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, presented him with the Best Supporting Actor award for his turn as Nicole Kidman’s abusive husband in HBO’s eight-time Emmy Award-winning Big Little Lies. ‘It’s such a girl-power story,’ he raves. Skarsgård flew into LA from a shoot in Spain for the awards and a welcome reunion with the female-dominated cast, including Kidman and Reese Witherspoon, who also executive produced the series. ‘It was just an incredible gang of women, who are not only supremely talented, but the loveliest people you’ll ever meet. I was part of that girl gang and it was extraordinary.’
Who wouldn’t want Skarsgård as an honorary member of their girl gang? Never mind that he is Viking vertical. He seems even taller than his 6 ft. 4 inches when I meet him in a hotel room in Paris. (He conducts the interview precariously balanced on a miniature Marie Antoinette chair more suited to a garden gnome.) He could be a second row for the Stockholm Exiles rugby team, were it not for his refined features and sensitive, antifreeze-blue eyes, with the very slight squint of a man who is without his glasses. (This look, coupled with an eyebrow move, has been officially fetishised as ‘The Skarsbrow’.) Skarsgård is resolutely pro woman. ‘I’m 100 percent feminist. Sweden is very progressive. In terms of equal rights, I think it’s ahead of most countries.’
To prove it, he went to the 2015 LA premiere of The Diary of a Teenage Girl in Farrah Fawcett-style drag, to celebrate the film’s all-female visionaries: director Marielle Heller and graphic-novelist Phoebe Gloeckner. In the film, he played the affable moustachioed loser Monroe, who has a sexually explicit affair with his girlfriend’s underage daughter – another reproachable supporting male in a female-led story. And at 2017’s Emmys, Skarsgård cheered in support of Witherspoon’s rallying cry for more women’s stories to be told in Hollywood. ‘I think our society is changing and it’s fantastic that we have all these projects now where women’s voices are heard,’ he says. ‘That they’re not just actresses being hired; they are the genesis of the project. It’s them telling their stories, and I really think Big Little Lies is a great example of that.’
He is also quick to acknowledge that, when it comes to on-screen roles, there is definite gender bias in the industry. Skarsgård has appeared on our screens in 50 shades of naked – as Eric Northman in seven seasons of True Blood, The Legend of Tarzan in 2016, and exposing his appendage in Big Little Lies. But flesh exposure has never limited his career. ‘There is a double standard [in the film industry]. I notice that with actress friends of mine. And it’s disgusting.’ And, as for casting-couch culture post-Harvey Weinstein, he adds, ‘It’s not a problem that is specific to Hollywood. I think you see this in many professions, where men with power think they’re entitled. So these women are very brave to talk about it, and I do believe it will fundamentally change things.’
Skarsgård is ponderous on such disturbing matters, but when talk turns to himself, he s playful and wonderfully sarcastic; so much so that it leans towards avoidance. There is no earnest account of method preparation for his lead role in Mute, where he plays a mute former-Amish man working as a bartender in 2052 Berlin – a futuristic immigrant city-turned-Gomorrah where every aspect of human lives is entirely and enforcedly run by corporations. So did he stop talking for several months? ‘I never do preparation,’ he jokes. Stay silent between takes? ‘I talked a lot – and I mean a lot.’ The film was in some ways a tribute to director Jones’ late father, David Bowie, whose most creative periods were spent in Berlin with his son: ‘We definitely felt [Bowie’s] presence.’
Mute juxtaposes futuristic Berlin – full of drone-flown ethnic takeaways, cyber-brothels and sexbots – with the spartan, anti-technological existence of the Amish. Skarsgård can certainly see the appeal of the latter. He doesn’t really partake in the social media world. ‘Sometimes, I think it’s good to be bored, because that’s when your mind wanders; creativity is born that way. But we don’t allow for those moments anymore, because if there are three seconds of downtime, you are on your phone or you’re checking your Insta-feed or Twitter.’
Skarsgård grew up in the then working class, now gentrified, hip district of SoFo (that’s ‘south of Folkungagatan’) in Stockholm. His mother was a doctor and his father, Stellan, worked with legendary director Ingmar Bergman at Stockholm’s Royal National Theatre. ‘It was more like a commune – very artistic, very hippy. Our apartment was a social hub in south Stockholm. Lots of Dad’s friends were actors, musicians, painters or intellectuals; left-wing, anarchistic. My dad was either naked or in something free-flowing.’
By the age of 13, Alexander had landed a lead role in a Swedish TV show, which made him famous in his own right. ‘To have people talk about you and say, “Well, this is who Alex is…” when I had no idea myself, it just fucked with my self-confidence. Because if a girl looked at me or seemed interested, I thought she was only interested because she had seen me in the movie. It made me feel worthless. I wanted girls in school to like me because I was funny or cute or interesting – that’s what you want, isn’t it? When you’re 13? And I guess when you’re 40 as well…’ He lets out a wry laugh.
A fascination with British culture – ‘I grew up watching Alan Partridge religiously’ – brought him to the UK for a year-long stint studying English at Leeds Metropolitan University. When I ask if he has a penchant for funny British girls (he dated Alexa Chung for two years), he sidesteps my question: ‘British humour is the best. Brits are very dry, sarcastic and self-deprecating.’ It was at Leeds that he took up acting again, having quit in his late teens, and went on to study first at the Marymount Manhattan College in New York, then moving to LA.
Apart from his three-minute wonder turn as Scandi model Meekus in Zoolander in 2001, it took him another seven years to get his big break – in 2008, with a key role in HBO’s Iraq War series Generation Kill. This was soon followed by vampire drama True Blood. The Legend of Tarzan was Skarsgård’s first big-budget movie, and it necessitated 9 months of intense monastic living. ‘A part of me was miserable on a Saturday night, knowing my friends were out having a good time and I was at home eating broccoli about to go to the gym. But in a sadistic way, I really embraced the challenge.’ When he wrapped the Tarzan shoot at Leavesden Studios in Hertfordshire, he took a car from Watford straight to his dad’s rental flat in east London: ‘I spent three days on his couch with a funnel in my mouth being fed bone marrow and wine.’
Due to a back-to-back film schedule that meant he would be on the road for seven months, Skarsgård recently gave up his New York apartment of two years. For now, he’s living out of a single suitcase. ‘It makes you think about overconsumption. Because, if it doesn’t fit in the suitcase, I can’t get it.’ He has also shot The Aftermath in Hamburg, a post-World War II film opposite Keira Knightley, as well as Hold the Dark, about a wolf hunter in the Alaskan wilderness (the actor is environmentally conscious and recently went to Greenland with Greenpeace). With five more projects in the pipeline, including tech-trader drama The Hummingbird Project, for which he’s been sporting a ‘spectacular’ monk-like hair cut – ‘I have an inclination that I’ve lost a lot of my fans’ – there is no sign of Alexander Skarsgård unpacking just yet.
Mute launches on Netflix this month
Sources: Our digital scans & transcription from Elle UK (March 2018),
Photographs: Justin R Campbell/Contour by Getty Images, Collage by PATRICK WAUGH
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