Cult of Jack

David Bowie  “Heroes” EP

New Alex interview in the February 11, 2018 edition of Observer Magazine!  

Alexander Skarsgård: ‘Hollywood is very silly. People are so anxious’

The True Blood actor takes glee in pricking the pomposity of his profession and wonders if he should be an architect instead

When Alexander Skarsgård was 20 years old, half his lifetime ago, he decided to give acting a shot. At the time, he had left his native Sweden for Leeds – “of all places” – and was studying English at what’s now called Leeds Beckett University. It was a toss-up between training to be an actor or an architect. “I was like most people that age, trying to figure out what to do,” he recalls. “And it was kind of: ‘Fuck it, Dad’s an actor, he’s super-happy doing it, maybe I should give it a go.’ I felt like, if I don’t try it now, there is a risk that I’ll look back 30, 40 years from now and think: ‘Why didn’t I? What an idiot!’

“Yeah,” Skarsgård goes on, smiling, “I’d like to be able to say it was a calling, that creatively I was just driven to do it, but um… I wasn’t.”

Two decades on, it turns out not to have been Skarsgård’s worst decision. In his first American film, he played a vacuous male model in Zoolander (“Earth to Meekus”), but that was followed by a fallow period: “For two and a half years, I didn’t work.”

The drought finally broke in 2007 when he landed a role as a US Marine in the Ed Burns and David Simon-led mini-series Generation Kill about the invasion of Iraq and then the big one, a recurring part as the mighty Eric Northman, the 1,000-year-old bar owner and “sheriff” in the cult hit True Blood.

“When they called me and said: ‘Oh, do you want to audition for this vampire Viking thing?’ I didn’t expect that show to last for seven years.” He laughs so hard he almost spits his lunch across the table. “Never thought that would happen.”

Since True Blood finished in 2014, the 41-year-old Skarsgård has been an eight-packed modern incarnation of Tarzan, and he has recently won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of a charming yet sinister wife abuser in the eight-part television drama Big Little Lies.

Skarsgård has become so successful that he’s in effect made himself homeless. On the day we meet, in the gilded surrounds of Hotel Le Meurice in Paris, he is on a brief stopover between Hamburg, where he’s been shooting with Keira Knightley, and Calgary, Canada, where his next film starts. The gaps between his last four projects were so small that he gave up his apartment in New York and put all his belongings in storage.

“I’m not married and I don’t have kids, and I’m really enjoying it at the moment,” says Skarsgård. “There’s something quite Buddhist about the sense that you can only have eight items or whatever. Because I have my one suitcase and whatever doesn’t fit in that, I can’t bring. So the other day, I wanted to buy a pair of sneakers and I realised they’re not going to fit in the suitcase, so I have to decide, how badly do I want them? Because if I buy these, I have to leave the other pair. So in terms of consumption, it really makes you think.”

Skarsgård looks down: his slouchy V-neck tee and denim incongruous in the opulent, high-ceilinged Le Meurice. “So you’ll see me wearing the same T-shirt and the same jeans now for the next six months,” he says.

The size of a tree and strapping with it, outlandishly handsome even by Scandinavian standards, Skarsgård could easily have gone down the path of the himbo. But the reality, in person, is that he is both too smart and too silly for that to happen. He takes glee in pricking the pomposity of Hollywood and telling you how “crazy” most of the people are there. When he’s given a plus one for work trips, he prefers not to take an agent or a publicist, but a friend from back home: “A pot-smoking musician from Gothenburg.” On his Instagram feed (@rexdanger: “Danger is my maiden name”), he’ll post a picture of the Eiffel Tower with the caption: “When in Rome”; another recent image seems to show him urinating against a wall.

It’s not all jokes. Skarsgård will talk with intensity about the nine months he spent getting into shape for Tarzan: the relentless gym and dance sessions, the six precisely weighed meals a day, most of them tuna. But he’s not by nature the self-denying type: as soon as the movie wrapped, he spent three days on a couch eating mozzarella and bone marrow and drinking wine. For lunch now, he has a plate of Dover sole the size of a dustbin lid, but when I suggest that he’s taken the healthy option, he looks mortified: “No, no, no, there’s a lot of butter on this little guy.”

Today, the main item on the agenda, in theory, is Skarsgård’s new sci-fi movie Mute, directed by Duncan Jones. The word “long-awaited” often flies around, but this is the real deal. A screenplay was written in 2003 by Jones, David Bowie’s son, and he planned for it to be his first film. But the budget requirements for the ambitious futuristic setting made that unworkable, so instead Jones made Moon, a scaled-back tale that starred Sam Rockwell as a helium-3 miner on the far side of the moon. That won him a Bafta in 2010 for the outstanding debut by a British filmmaker.

Mute, which Jones calls “a companion piece to Moon”, has since become “my Don Quixote”, a nod to the Terry Gilliam film that became a lightning rod for shambolic misfortune. In the intervening years, Jones has also made a couple of other films and had a turbulent period personally, including having a baby, his wife’s successful battle with cancer and the deaths of both his father and Marion, the woman who raised him.

Something else happened in those years: Netflix came along. Mute is set in Berlin in 2052 and follows a speechless Swiss-Amish bartender, Leo (Skarsgård), whose girlfriend Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh) inexplicably goes missing. His search takes him deep into a neon-saturated underworld, populated by gangsters and a pair of anarchic American field surgeons (Paul Rudd and Justin Theroux), as well as freaky robot dancers and frankly terrifying sexbots, complete with sucker pads and studded dildos.

One of Jones’s inspirations was Blade Runner and that’s where Netflix, and its cavernous pockets, came in. “It’s a quite expensive movie; because he wants to create Berlin in 2052, it’s a big world,” says Skarsgård. “And it’s tough today to make movies that are dramatic, dark, character-driven for a lot of money, because if studios are going to pay for a movie, they want big action. What’s great about Netflix, in a way, is that it wants a wide variety of projects and it doesn’t have to cater to everyone. It can take chances on projects like these.”

From the snippets of Mute that have been released, it’s hard to work out how absurd and obscene Jones’s vision is. “It’s very dystopian, but not that far-fetched unfortunately, because it’s a society run by corporations,” says Skarsgård. “You subscribe to a corporation and then they will provide everything for you – housing, healthcare, food – but they basically own you. And it’s eerie that Duncan wrote that 15 years ago, especially with Citizens United in the States, the supreme court decision where there’s no limit to the money you can pump into politics. And having a businessman-entertainer as president now. Also by the way, it’s 2052, but we’re still fighting in Afghanistan, we’re still involved.”

So we could be looking at the future then? Skarsgård looks a little traumatised and then sighs: “Hopefully not.”

Skarsgård’s own upbringing is a long way from dystopian. When he mentioned that his father was an actor, he was of course being modest: “Dad” is the great Stellan Skarsgård, a stalwart of everything from Lars von Trier’s films to Pirates of the Caribbean and Mamma Mia!. His mother, My, is a doctor and the family home is in Södermalm, south Stockholm, traditionally a working-class area, but now full of beards and coffee shops. Skarsgård Snr has eight children, seven boys and a girl, Alexander is the eldest and the youngest is five. And he’s created something of an acting dynasty: his sons Gustaf, Bill and Valter all work in film and television.

“I try to go back to Sweden whenever I can, I love it, it’s the best,” says Skarsgård. “It’s complete chaos, but it’s awesome, because there’s dogs and cats and kids and boyfriends, girlfriends… It’s almost like a commune. Because they all basically live together: my parents are divorced, but they live a block away from each other and they are still best friends. Mum’s brother is my dad’s childhood friend. They’ve been best friends since they were kids, and they live in the same building.

“It’s very different from my lifestyle, moving around when I’m shooting movies,” he continues. “But yeah, eventually when it’s time to have kids and stuff, I want to have nine. I want to beat my dad.”

Skarsgård is often linked with co-stars and glamorous women; most recently he dated Alexa Chung for a couple of years, but they broke up last summer. He’s remarkably open in most ways, and he’s almost apologetic today when he says that he’d rather not discuss his relationships.

“Yeah, I don’t talk about it much, and that’s a way to protect it,” he says. “When I was a kid, that’s how my father dealt with it. I wouldn’t say it kept him sane, because he’s pretty crazy, but somewhat. The fact that he protected his private life so much, and protected my mum who is not an actor or a public figure.”

The amount that Skarsgård is currently working, he admits, certainly doesn’t help. “I do it now because I can and I’m really enjoying it,” he says. “And I don’t have a life” – a dry laugh. “But I definitely want kids and, if I do, I probably would prioritise differently. And if I want nine, I’d better get started pretty soon then, right?”

Certainly Skarsgård is on a hot run right now, especially following Big Little Lies. His character, Perry, was a monster who bullied and physically violated his wife Celeste (played by Nicole Kidman), but Skarsgård skilfully teased out his insecurity and the turbulent complexity of their relationship. In his speech after winning the Golden Globe he called it “the best experience of my career”. “Nicole’s a decent actress, actually,” says Skarsgård. “Surprisingly.” He arches an eyebrow, “Yeah, she’s obviously fucking incredible, so what a treat to work with someone like that.”

Big Little Lies is returning for a second season – and so, intriguingly, is Perry – and Skarsgård, working non-stop, looks set to fill our screens over the coming months and years. But he’s not about to become carried away by his current success. “I’m so ridiculously lucky and fortunate to be where I am,” he says. “I have friends who are way better actors than I am who are not working.

“Hollywood is very silly in a way,” he explains. “It’s like playing marbles when you were a kid in the schoolyard. People are so anxious: ‘What filmmaker is hot right now? Which actor is hot?’ Same thing in the school playground: the cool kid says: ‘This is the marble to get.’ And everyone is like: ‘Oh my God, I want it!’”

Skarsgård drains his coffee cup and stands up: at 6ft 4in, his presence suddenly makes the reception room we are in feel like a doll’s house. But he smiles goofily and shakes hands. “It’s here today, gone tomorrow,” he says. “I don’t expect this ride to last for ever and maybe I don’t want it to. Maybe I should revisit architecture and become an architect instead, and just live in one place and not travel around. Actually be able to get some furniture and hang a painting on a wall. Definitely I’m not taking it too seriously.”

Mute is released on Netflix on 23 February.

Mute (2018), dir. Duncan Jones

“Mute“ by Duncan Jones