The Guardian interview

Afew years ago, Alexander Skarsgård turned up at a Hammarby football match in Stockholm noticeably… what’s a polite way of putting this? Worse for wear? “I was sh!tfaced says Skarsgård. “I went up in front of the crowd and started doing this chant. Someone put it on YouTube. I’m very drunk, going: f&cking c^nts listen to me!’ I thought: ‘This is real embarrassing.’”

During the bleak hangover that followed, the 40-year-old Swedish actor thought he might have torpedoed a career that had just seen him get the part of Tarzan in this summer’s blockbuster. In fact it made him an even more perfect fit for the role. “Warner Bros had said they needed someone primal and animalistic,” he says. “So my agent sent them the video, saying: ‘Isn’t this *beep* primal enough for you?’”

Another one of the half-million people who watched it was John Michael McDonagh, writer-director of The Guard and Calvary, who was on the lookout for a hard-drinking detective for his pitch-black buddy comedy War On Everyone. “He saw the video and went: ‘That’s the guy,’” says Skarsgård. “It got me the job. The moral of the story is: Make a fool of yourself and people will love you. Remember that, kids.”

When we meet around midday in the lobby of the Hotel Normandy during the Deauville American film festival, it seems he’s taken his own lesson to heart. The previous night he was so smashed that he invaded the DJ booth at War On Everyone’s afterparty and proved that while you can take the man out of Sweden… “I played strictly Abba,” he says. “When in doubt, Lay All Your Love On Me. We closed that place down.”

As he concertinas himself into the back of a people carrier for the two-hour drive to Charles de Gaulle airport, sheltering his eyes behind dark shades, it’s somehow reassuring to know that savage hangovers afflict even movie stars who’ve been blessed with the sort of face that led Ben Stiller to cast him in Zoolander so he could ask him: “Did you ever think there’s more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good-looking?”

Skarsgård has been figuring out an answer to that ever since. He starred as a brooding, topless vampire in HBO’s True Blood, which ran for seven years until 2014, and made him a pin-up and earned him a legion of fans who’d approach wanting nothing more than to get bitten. (He never did. You bite one fan…) Simultaneously, the show’s success gave him the opportunity to play odd parts in indie films that didn’t trade on his looks. In coming-of-age-in-the-70s film The Diary Of A Teenage Girl, he was the mustachioed creep who slept with his girlfriend’s daughter; in Melancholia’s dreamlike apocalypse he was an earnest, cuckolded newlywed; and in next year’s Duncan Jones-directed Mute he’ll play a silent Amish character. “It’s not about wanting to show I’m versatile,” he explains. “It’s just feeling that excitement of not knowing who a character is but figuring it out and finding him.”


Yet he was back with his pecs out this summer for The Legend Of Tarzan, a blockbuster that, like many in 2016, struggled at the box office. He says he was drawn in by the character’s search for a place in the world and impressed by Harry Potter director David Yates’s ability to make a £140m film feel “intimate”. But it was in some ways a change of scale. “I work mostly in independent movies so the scope of Tarzan was definitely different,” Skarsgård says. “I didn’t feel pressured [by the box office demands] though. It wasn’t like: ‘Oh *beep*, this is a big movie.’ It was an incredible experience, but it was also nine months of just gym, work and bed. I didn’t have a sip of alcohol. It was robotic.”

Which explains the appeal of War On Everyone, a film in which he both downs and takes shots in every direction. Skarsgård plays Terry, a perma-drunk, Glen Campbell-obsessed, unapologetically corrupt detective partnered with the lightning-witted Bob, played by The Martian’s Michael Peña. It’s the old bad cop/worse cop routine, but laced with fierce cleverness. Where Shane Black’s The Nice Guys were bumbling dunces, McDonagh’s pair trade wisecracks peppered with esoteric references to everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to realist painter Andrew Wyeth.

Their cocaine-fuelled romp takes them through an Albuquerque inexplicably peopled with Quaker bank robbers and burqa-wearing tennis players as the duo go in search of a missing million dollars and that most evil villain of all: a member of the English upper class. It’s wildly irreverent, the tone set by an opening scene in which the pair try to knock down a mime (to see if he’ll make a sound). Likewise, McDonagh’s script lives up to its name by making puckish jokes on any subject you care to think of. Skarsgård, hunching his lean frame into a stoop, relishes it.


“It’s so un-PC, it’s so me,” says Skarsgård. “You could tell John didn’t give a *beep* about anything, which I found refreshing in a script. I’d read a couple of comedies but nothing that was fun or intelligent enough. When I got this script and it was dark and twisted and weird and completely out there, I was excited.” And besides, he adds, “[John is] a beautiful soul, which helps when you insult everyone.”

He even sees some similarities between his dirty detective and the king of the swingers. “As with Tarzan, there’s dichotomy in the character between being a civilised man and a beast. That’s something we can all relate to. We live in a civilised society, but 12 hours ago we were beasts dancing to Abba.”


Skarsgård has spent his life caught between different worlds: blockbusters and indies, Sweden and the States. During his bohemian upbringing he wanted to be like his friends’ dads who wore suits and drove Saabs. When Skarsgård was 20, his own father Stellan found international fame in Lars von Trier’s Breaking The Waves, and they would go on to appear together for Von Trier in Melancholia. However, when Alexander was growing up his father was simply an eccentric thespian with a penchant for walking around nude. “He was a weird Bergman actor. A 12-year-old kid doesn’t give a *beep* about that,” says Skarsgård. “He’d be walking around naked or wearing weird Moroccan robes. As a teenager you’re just like: ‘Come on, dad!’”


The young Skarsgård’s first taste of fame was his own. His appearance at the age of 12 in TV film The Dog That Smiled made him a child star, but he soon found he hated the attention and quit acting. “I was desperate to be normal and blend in,” he says. He saw his chance at a life on the straight-and-narrow by enrolling in the Swedish military at 19, “unheard of” in his family. “That was my way to rebel,” he says.

Afterwards, still in search of himself, he decided to head to university in the UK. But he swerved London to find a more authentic British experience, and enrolled at Leeds Met. “It doesn’t get more British than a northern, working-class town,” he says. “There was a club called the Majestic where they had student nights and it was a pound a pint. We lived in Headingley, near the pubs on the Otley Run. Uni was a *beep* excuse for being there. I was studying British culture. I loved it.”


Deciding at 20 that he may have been a little hasty quitting acting, it was while visiting Stellan in LA that he won his small part in Zoolander – at his first Hollywood audition – but it was a false dawn. It would be another seven years before he got a major role, and he spent the time in between shuttling between theatres and coffee shops. When he was cast in David Simon and Ed Burns’s Iraq miniseries Generation Kill, he spent a month convinced he was about to be sacked. “It was only after four or five weeks I realised they weren’t going to recast,” he says. “Before that all I could think about was how much it would cost them to reshoot the big fight scenes after they fired me.”

Imposter syndrome is a common feeling – although a little hard to believe from a handsome, 6ft 4in movie star. “That *beep* doesn’t change,” he assures me. “I felt like that on Tarzan. I was on set thinking: ‘When is the director going to come over and say: Dude, you can go home. We’ve got Tarzan here now.’ That was 10 years after Generation Kill.”

Alexander Skarsgård, then: just like the rest of us. Fond of a pub crawl, obnoxious at sporting events, constantly waiting for that tap on the shoulder telling him the jig is up. So life is still pretty much the same when you’re really, really, really ridiculously good-looking?

“I mean, *beep*, I still wake up shivering in the foetal position,” he says. “I’m incredibly grateful for the opportunities I get. Getting drunk on someone else’s dime listening to Abba is brilliant, but my life is still *beep* I’m still agonising. What the *beep* am I doing with my life? Where do I belong? Who gives a *beep*? Let me assure you, it doesn’t get any better.”

War On Everyone is in cinemas from Friday


https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/01/alexander-skarsgard-war-on-everyone?CMP=fb_gu