Wicker 2026 Cast Interview, Deadline.com (x) Sundance FF '26.
[Extract]
Skarsgård said he initially found the role of the wicker husband a challenging concept.
“I was a little intimidated reading the script,” he said. “I knew I wanted to do it, and I was incredibly excited about playing this character, but he has a purity that scared me. I often gravitate towards conflicted characters, characters where there’s a darkness, or an internal struggle, or some kind of weird dichotomy of friction. And there’s a lot of friction in the movie, but none of it comes from the wicker husband. He is just pure — not naive — he’s just there. He loves his wife, and it’s just happy and sweet. So that scared me a bit.”
It felt like a departure from his previous roles, he said. “I didn’t really know how to approach it. I’m so used to — even if it’s a character who is ostensibly a protagonist — I often gravitate towards finding some darkness or friction or something that I lean into that because I feel like that’s very playable. I felt a bit unmoored by this, because then I was like, oh, not only is is the character void of that internal friction, I also know that I have to kind of exaggerate everything, so I can’t be completely real and natural in the scenes, because, I was wearing a full mask every day, a full body suit actually glued to my face and body. And the way you move your face, you have to exaggerate it a bit. So that scared me also, playing these beautifully written scenes, intimate, quiet scenes with Olivia, where I can read every little detail on your face, or, then I have to go, like, [exaggerates expressions] ‘Ohhhh, realllllyy.’ And that made me little insecure, because I’m like, ‘Oh, I’m sh-t. This is terrible.'”
