#and work

In the film industry, there’s a thing called a “rollout”. It refers to the marketing and distribution strategy by which, through platforms and promotion, studios ensure that their movies get seen by as wide an audience as possible. For the Skarsgård family, the Swedish creative dynasty made up of actors, writers, poets and a couple of long- suffering medics, whose current patriarch is the 74-year-old actor Stellan, it means something else entirely.

“Every day we had this thing called utrullning, which means ‘rollout’: it’s when you roll Grandma out. My uncle Johan would roll her down to this restaurant in a square in south Stockholm where she had a standing table every day at one o’clock. She would drink too much, so Dad and his siblings made a deal with her: one pint of beer, then one 6cl Fernet Branca, then a 4cl Fernet Branca. People would go down there — cousins and second cousins and aunts and uncles — because everyone lived in the same neighbourhood and you knew that Grandma would be there holding court for two hours, talking about everything and nothing. It was a really lovely tradition.”

Explaining this to me is Alexander Skarsgård, 49, the eldest of Stellan’s eight children and, despite some competition from his younger brothers Bill, Gustaf and Valter, who are also actors, currently the best known. (There’s an even younger Skarsgård acting contingent, too: Alexander’s half-brothers, 16-year-old Ossian and 13-year-old Kolbjörn, have also dabbled). In terms of where you might know him from, he’s played all kinds of roles, in part because he’s versatile, but also, perhaps, because it hasn’t always been obvious what to do with him. On the one hand he has an extraordinary physicality — he’s 6’4 and is, by any conventional measure, A Hunk — but he also has dry sense of humour and a taste for the weird. It’s a pretty delectable combination, and makes him a hugely appealing and intriguing figure, both on-screen and off.

It also means that, over his more than 30-year career, Skarsgård’s had the chance to show some range. He played the sexy vampire Eric Northman in seven seasons of the Southern Gothic drama True Blood. He was the scene-stealing, slider-shod tech billionaire Lukas Matsson in Succession. He embodied a vengeful Viking in Robert Eggers’ stylised epic The Northman. He won an Emmy as Nicole Kidman’s charming and abusive husband Perry in the glossy miniseries Big Little Lies. He was Tarzan in Tarzan. This year, he was a misanthropic android in the sci-fi comedy series Murderbot. Going back a bit, he was Meekus, one of the ill-fated male models in Zoolander’s iconic “gasoline fight”.

Grandma was not impressed. She’d say, ‘I could tell you weren’t really trying hard'

One critic, though, proved consistently hard to please. “Grandma was definitely not impressed,” says Skarsgård, of his farmor’s verdict on his career. “She’d be brutally honest, like, ‘Yeah, I saw that thing. That wasn’t very good. I could tell you weren’t really trying hard.’ And I’d say, ‘You’re right, Grandma, I was kind of winging it.’ But it also meant that getting a compliment from her meant a lot, because you knew that she wouldn’t sugarcoat anything. You wanna try the cauliflower?”

Skarsgård is brandishing a floret at me in a gastropub in Waterloo, south London, where we are having the kind of jolly dinner that Grandma might have enjoyed, though sadly minus the Fernet Branca: he has just flown in from a shooting stint in Belfast on a yet-to-be-announced film and is on the Diet Coke. Along with the cauliflower, he has ordered the Dover sole and fries and has already given his verdict on my herring, prepared not in the Swedish style — “we don’t fuck with capers” — but nonetheless, he confirms after a long pause, chewing meditatively, “quite nice”.

A little before all this, I pick him up from his central-London hotel, waiting in the lobby with the trepidation of someone who is about to go for a walk with a giraffe. Unlike most actors, Skarsgård is famously tall, not to mention something of an internet honey right now, thanks in no small part to a string of playfully styled red-carpet and chat-show appearances. Even if he seems unlikely to be sporting leather thigh boots or short-shorts today, it is hard to predict how inconspicuous our walk through the city would be.

To my relief, he arrives in the lobby in classic famous-person-on-the-down-low attire: a grey quarter-zip sweater, sweatpants, Converse, shades and a baseball cap; the latter perhaps less classic, given it is embroidered with the name of Pillow-Cat Books, a New York store that specialises in books about animals. He’s tall, yes, but not freakishly so — no zookeeping skills required — and we head out on foot into the balmy late-September evening.

I’m ashamed to admit that, despite having lived in London my whole life, the pressure of having to convey a celebrity across the Thames gets the better of me. I take us on an unnecessarily circuitous route, up piss-stained stairwells and through grotty underpasses, with Skarsgård keeping pace obligingly. He does, however, draw the line at jay-walking — not even a bike lane! — confirming that, despite a globe-trotting career and two decades living in the States, he remains, in his heart, a law-abiding Swede. When we are finally seated at our outdoor table, the pub’s staff having almost successfully feigned ignorance, we start by discussing Pillion, the film that has instigated those saucy red-carpet get-ups, and also our dinner.

The feature debut of British director Harry Lighton, Pillion is the story of a timid gay man, Colin — played by the British actor Harry Melling — whose life is upturned by a chance encounter with a mysterious, sexually forthright biker, Ray, played by Skarsgård. The pair embark on a thrilling but also strangely domesticated BDSM-based relationship, which is kinky but also sweet, and occasionally very funny. There’s not much that’s quite like it, though it has tonal similarities to Halina Reijn’s recent movie Babygirl, and I suggest to Skarsgård that both could be labelled as DomComs, a new genre I’m desperately trying to coin. “DomCom! That’s great,” he says with a kind laugh, like the tired father of a toddler.

It’s worth mentioning at this point that Skarsgård is, in fact, the tired father of a toddler: he has a three-year-old son with the Swedish actress and director Tuva Novotny. In fact, as he’ll suggest through passing comments here and there, he does seem to be entering a different mode. After two decades spent in LA and then New York, Skarsgård has recently moved back to Stockholm: not so much a case of a prodigal son returning, he says — he has never stayed away for very long — but a practical decision, given that so many projects, including American ones, are shot in Europe these days. Plus, of course, both his nuclear and extended family are there. “It wasn’t a hard decision,” he says.

Pillion, which received an eight-minute ovation at Cannes, undoubtedly counts as one of Skarsgård’s more leftfield choices. The shoot, during which Skarsgård relocated to Brixton, took place in and around Bromley; to keep the costs down, the production headquarters were based in a former old people’s home. Because time and budgets were tight, Skarsgård’s very first encounter with his co-star Melling was rehearsing a scene in which they engage in an erotic grappling match. “We basically met, shook hands, and started wrestling,” Skarsgård remembers, though he points out they were not yet in costume: in the final version of the scene, Melling wears a one-piece with a hole cut out of the bum.

We were running around, shooting guerilla- style. It was wild and I loved it

It’s the kind of lightly anarchic working environment in which Skarsgård seems to thrive. “I sound really old now, but to be around a lot of young, enthusiastic, energetic film workers was really inspiring and created a special energy,” he says. “Obviously, they couldn’t afford to close off streets, so we were running around downtown Bromley with no security, just shooting guerilla-style. It was playful and fun and wild and, yeah, I loved it.” Also on hand, and in the film itself, were members of The Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club, who helped ensure an authentic portrayal of their subculture. The GBMC even got to attend the premiere at Cannes, including one member who almost eclipsed Skarsgård’s thigh boots by wearing a full leather “pup” outfit. (His name is Paul.)

Sadly though, not everyone who matters to Skarsgård will get to see the movie. His grandmother died nine years ago, and so was denied the opportunity to watch her grandson receive an inexpert blow job down an alleyway next to the Bromley branch of Primark. Possibly just as well? “Oh no, she would have devoured this movie,” says Skarsgård. “She didn’t give a fuck. She was incredibly sexually liberated and open. She’d be like, ‘I don’t care who you sleep with as long as you’re happy.’ I think she would have enjoyed Pillion.”

To understand Alexander, you first have to understand his place in the Skarsgård clan. He was raised in Södermalm, the traditionally working-class, artsy neighbourhood of Stockholm, in a lively apartment where art- istic debates, fuelled by wine and cigarettes, floated across the kitchen table. Stellan was mostly a theatre actor at the time, while his mother, My, trained to be a doctor while Alexander and his siblings were young. Not all of the kids would follow directly in Stellan’s footsteps: Eija, the only daughter, is a casting director and third son Sam is a doctor like his mum.

Skarsgård’s introduction to acting came pretty much by osmosis — messing around backstage while his father rehearsed Strindberg plays with Ingmar Bergman — or the occasional bit part, such as when his dad did Hamlet for TV, and Alexander and Gustaf were cast as extras. “I was maybe six, and my brother was three, and they had to hide little pieces of candy in the snow because Gus would run off and not stay in the frame. I remember being frustrated, like, ‘Doesn’t he understand?! We have to pretend to be playing in the snow!’ I mean, he was three years old, so I don’t know what I expected, but I took my craft seriously.”

Having a theatre actor for a father didn’t bring too much heat — “It wasn’t as if my 12-year-old friends were like, ‘Have you seen [Strindberg’s] The Father?’” — although that changed somewhat when Alexander was in his early teens and Stellan was cast as… Hamilton. Carl Hamilton. “Hamilton is like the Swedish equivalent of James Bond,” Skarsgård explains. “A bunch of different actors have played him over the years. That’s the first time my friends had seen something Dad had done. We thought he was cool. He definitely thought he was cool. He went from being a cerebral artist to wearing tight jeans and cowboy boots and driving a Corvette.”

Skarsgård’s first proper acting job also came more or less by accident, when another friend of his dad’s, the Swedish actor and director Allan Edwall, cast him as the lead in a film called Ake and His World. “He was at our place having dinner, drinking wine, and he needed a seven-year-old kid. I was seven years old. He was like, ‘Hey Stellan, can I ask your son if he wants to be in my movie?’ And Dad and Mom were both like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ He cast me as Ake originally, but then he decided I was a way better fit for the friend from the slums who was sick and died. I was like, ‘Sure!’ I didn’t care. I could barely read.

The rest of the food arrives and Skarsgård attacks it gamely. He’s not on any kind of restrictive no-carbs regimen right now; when he shot The Northman, he put on an extra 20lb of muscle — though he’s no schlub at the best of times — and was allowed only three “treat meals” out of every 20. Though he’s a year shy of 50, he looks much younger, with sandy-blond hair that he wears in a boyish cut, and when he laughs, which he does often, he has the hint of an overbite that is charmingly close to goofy (which I would feel bad about writing were he not so obviously hot).

It could have all worked out quite differently, though. By the time he was 13, Skarsgård’s acting career hit a roadblock. He had appeared in a made-for-TV movie, The Dog That Smiled (it sounds faintly better in Swedish), that was seen widely as it was broadcast on one of the national terrestrial channels, of which there were only two at the time. He quickly decided that being recognised in the street was not for him. “I was never pursuing acting, and after that I was like, ‘This is annoying.’ It was very easy for me to just continue school and not go off and do something in the summer months.”

At the age of 19, he enacted a modest rebellion against his “bohemian, urban environment” and “not very outdoorsy parents” by joining the Swedish navy: he signed up on a whim after being handed a recruiting pamphlet in a park that made it look “badass”. (National service was technically still mandatory in Sweden at the time, but as Skarsgård recalls, “I don’t really feel like it” was as much as you needed to say to be excused.) He spent a year and a half cruising round the Stockholm archipelago in small boats with other young Swedish men, in scenes that it’s hard not to imagine as a maritime version of Meekus, Derek and their ridiculously- good-looking friends driving around in an open-top Jeep to Wham’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go”.

But perhaps that’s unfair. This was after the Cold War and before the more recent rise in Russian aggression, so the chances of happening upon an enemy submarine in the Baltic were slim, but that didn’t mean there weren’t tense moments, notably in the final week of his service. “We got a call that they’d seen a frogman on one of the islands,” Skarsgård remembers. “They gave us live ammunition, and we had to go a couple hours south of Stockholm to secure these islands, to check for any ingoing or outgoing tracks. There was nothing in the end, but it was enough to get your heart rate up, sitting with my three friends and live ammunition with no idea if there’d be Russian Special Forces there. It got very real.”

Leeds was fantastic! It had a club with a one-quid-pint student night. Incredible

After his stint in the navy, he and his best friend Ulrik decided to forgo that well-worn path of Swedes heading to London in favour of “a real British experience… we landed on Leeds.” He did a six-month English Literature course at Leeds Metropolitan University, which, he says, was “fantastic! Grimy and intense, and it had a massive nightclub called Majestic with a one-quid-pint student night. Incredible.” That was followed by an abortive stint at drama school in New York, which he quit because of a girl, followed by a few years of professional meandering.

He did, in that time, get his first Hollywood audition: another bit of happenstance when he was in LA visiting his dad. “I was working in Stockholm as a bus boy and a barista, but had started doing small acting jobs. Dad’s manager knew that and asked if I wanted to go to an audition while I was on vacation. I was like, ‘That could be a fun story!’ And it was Zoolander.” Skarsgård bagged himself both the part and American representation, unusual for a Swedish actor at the time, so he moved to Los Angeles to be where the work was. Or, in his case, wasn’t. “Except for small supporting roles in Sweden, I didn’t get another job for five years after that,” he says. “Right up to Generation Kill.”

Generation Kill, which aired on HBO in 2008, is the job of which Skarsgård, even now, says he is most proud. Headed up by The Wire’s David Simon and Ed Burns, it dramatised the experiences of a real-life US Marine battalion during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Skarsgård was cast as the resident stoic, Staff Sergeant Brad “Iceman” Colbert, in what was a plum gig for any young actor. “Those years when I wasn’t working in LA, I was auditioning for, like, the jock in a bad horror movie who gets killed in the first scene, and I couldn’t even book that,” says Skarsgård. “And this is the one that I get? I could not believe my luck, and I remember thinking, ‘There’s no way this is actually going to happen.’”

But it did, and before he knew it Skarsgård found himself on a seven-month shoot in the Namibian desert with an acute case of imposter syndrome. “I couldn’t sleep at night, but I was really enjoying the work. It felt so authentic and not, like, glorifying, flag-waving bullshit. From my limited experience in the military, it just felt like it rang true. But I was like, ‘I’m probably going to get fired tomorrow, so I may as well enjoy today.’ It wasn’t until we were two months into production that I started to realise that they can’t replace me — not because they want to keep me, but we’d done three episodes, and it was going to be too expensive to reshoot.”

Grandma was also a vocal fan of Generation Kill (“I remember she was into that one”), which prompts the question of how feedback works in general within the Skarsgård family circle. Bill has gained a cult following for his creepy portrayals of Pennywise in two It horror films and Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, while Gustaf did seven years on the History Channel series Vikings and has recently appeared in Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. In the last couple of months, Alexander has been bumping into his dad on the film-festival circuit, where Stellan has been promoting another touted indie, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. How frank are they about each other’s work?

“First of all, I don’t watch everything that they do, but it helps that I think they’re all incredibly talented,” says Skarsgård diplomatically, pointing out that it was actually his younger brother Gustaf who wanted to be an actor first, and went down the classical theatre-school route, so he was never the big brother with a target on his back. “I’ve honestly never seen one of my brothers or Dad and thought, ‘This is bad. I don’t believe this.’ I mean, we’ve all done stuff where you’re like, ‘This is not a masterpiece, but I get what you’re trying to do here and why you did it.’”

Actually no, there was one time, he recalls, when it did get awkward.

“So the author who wrote Carl Hamilton — the Swedish Bond — wrote this famous medieval book series. They were making it into what was, at the time, one of the biggest-budget Swedish movies ever, Arn, and I auditioned for the lead. This would have been those years between Zoolander and Generation Kill when I was mostly living in LA, not working much, and I got a bunch of call-backs: enough to get my hopes up where I was like, ‘Oh shit, this might actually happen. I really need this job. I really want this job’ — it all sounded like a pretty epic thing to do.

I can take not getting a job, but you kind of never want to hear about it again

“And I didn’t get it,” Skarsgård continues, enjoying himself now, “and then my dad ended up playing one of the chieftains in the film; and Gus played, like, a friend of the lead; and fucking Bill, who was a teenager, played a young prince. So it was a year of sitting around the dinner table hearing stories from the set of these big battle scenes they shot, and how amazing it was. I mean, I can take the disappointment of not getting a job, but if you’re close to getting something and you don’t get it, you kind of never want to hear about that project ever again and secretly hope it is going to do terribly at the box office and be a disaster.

“So that stung a little bit,” he says, good-naturedly. Then, with a mischievous smile: “But then the movies didn’t turn out that well.”

Now that Skarsgård’s back in Stockholm, the lively discussions over the family dinner table can ramp up again. His old friends are mostly still there, too: the ones with whom he “partied quite a lot” in his younger days. His brothers Sam and Gus now live in the apartment they all grew up in, “the epicentre of our universe”, which has been divided into two to accommodate their own families. Stellan and his second wife Megan live a block away; Eija and Valter both live round the corner. Alexander is a whole 10 minutes away, while his mother has relocated full-time to the family house on an island in the Stockholm archipelago, which is not as inaccessible as it sounds and can be reached in an hour.

Skarsgård’s leisure time in the city is now characterised less by brewing “really strong, really disgusting” beer at home to drink with his friends because they couldn’t get into Stockholm’s tonier nightclubs, and more by “eating cold baby food over the sink”. But it’s a shift that, as a father now, he’s happy to make in his personal life and also in his professional one: he remembers how, when he was growing up, his dad, who was in his mid-twenties when Alexander was born, was still cementing his acting career and could be summoned to a job in, say, India, at a moment’s notice.

Becoming a father slightly later brings some benefits, he says. “I’m glad I didn’t have that responsibility when I started out and could just be selfish and throw myself into anything without taking other people’s needs and desires into consideration. That obviously changes when you have a kid and you have responsibility. For example, with Murderbot” — the Apple TV+ series that has just been renewed for a second season — “my son was a year old when we started it, and it was shot in Toronto, but I was like, ‘I can’t go to Toronto for six months, so we need to look at the schedule, figure out a way I can come home and be with him, or when he can come out and be with me.' But I’m grateful that I am in a position today where I can afford to say no to stuff and also make sure that, when I do take a job, it works for the family.”

Skarsgård will fly back to Stockholm tomorrow. He hasn’t seen his son for two weeks and doesn’t want it to be more than that. The various generations of his family are currently working on a way to bring back utrullning: maybe not every day, but once or twice a week, and hey, don’t pushchairs have wheels?

After three hours of talking, he’s starting to look — though he’s too polite to admit it — a bit zonked. It feels only right to release him. (I’m not sure if he does it inadvertently or on purpose, but when I ask for the bill he shoots me a wink.) Does he need me to walk him all the way back to his hotel, I ask. “I’m a big boy,” he says. As his giraffe-like silhouette is outlined by the headlights of cars crossing Waterloo Bridge, I can see that he’s right.