Alexander Skarsgard discusses his roles in Infinity Pool and Succession
Alexander Skarsgard likes to explore the darker side in his screen roles, from Nicole Kidman’s husband in Big Little Lies to his latest in sci-fi horror film Infinity Pool.
Ever since he starred as a sexy 1000-year-old Viking vampire leader in Alan Ball’s series True Blood, Alexander Skarsgard has maintained a strong alliance with HBO, the studio that is prepared to dare more than others. And that suits the Swedish actor just fine.
He holds working alongside Nicole Kidman on HBO’s Big Little Lies as “one of his career highlights” – he won an Emmy, a Screen Actors Guild award and a Golden Globe for his role as her abusive husband – and last year he was nominated for an Emmy as guest actor in the third season of Succession, also an HBO series, where he plays Swedish tech mogul Lukas Matsson.
Skarsgard recalls that his agents initially called him about an offer to appear in three episodes of Succession. “They said, ‘It’s a small role and it might not be for you.’ But before I read anything, I was like, ‘I’m in, I don’t care what it is’, because I thought it was such an exceptional show. The writing is so good and the acting is phenomenal and this is the environment I want to be in on. Then I got very lucky because Matsson is a super fun character.”
He had conversations with showrunner Jesse Armstrong, who has written and directed many of the prime episodes. “I was a big fan of Peep Show and Jesse’s other comedic work in the UK. I came in as a fan basically because I just wanted to work with them. It’s basically a bunch of nerdy British comedy writers and their friends, and they set the tone for the whole project.”
His performance proved so successful that Matsson now has a prominent part in Succession’s fourth and final season.
Speaking at the Berlin film festival in February, Skarsgard isn’t about to spill the upcoming storylines in the popular series. At the time of this interview, he’d wrapped the shoot in New York just a couple of days earlier.
“It’s been a super fun season where Matsson’s involvement is nice and juicy,” is all he can say. “It’s really been a dream job.”
In the first two episodes of season four, the Roy family’s media conglomerate Waystar Royco is moving closer to a sale to Matsson’s GoJo. Brian Cox’s Logan Roy is initially triumphant that he has locked his children out of the deal.
But now Matsson hears they are back in on the bargaining and are hustling for a higher price. He threatens to pull out of the deal.
“I like you, but I want clarity before any nukes get launched,” Matsson tells Jeremy Strong’s Kendall Roy in no uncertain terms over the phone. More of Matsson’s clever manoeuvring seems inevitable in future episodes.
A genial and fun-loving actor, Skarsgard, 46, says he’s more mellow than the dark characters he so often plays. Officially we are meeting to discuss his latest and possibly darkest role: that of James Foster, a failed novelist suffering from writer’s block in Infinity Pool, written and directed by Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg, a specialist in body horror, which is very much in evidence here.
Initially the film unfolds like another HBO series, The White Lotus, with a group of wealthy holiday-makers up for a good time. It’s set on an impoverished fictional island named La Tolqa where James is accompanied by his super-rich wife Em (Australia’s up-and-coming Cleopatra Coleman) and meets an aggressive fan and temptress called Gabi, played by horror specialist and star of the current release Pearl, Mia Goth.
When James, Em, Gabi and her husband are involved in a car accident, it causes the death of a local boy. James was at the wheel and must atone for the death by his execution, though he is given the option to be cloned so his doppelganger can be executed instead.
Afterwards Gabi, who emerges as the leader of a sinister cult of Western sensualists, remains intent on humiliating James and we even see him on all fours wearing a dog collar and leash. These items caused something of a scandal on the Sundance red carpet where Skarsgard was photographed wearing them. It seems this Hollywood star – who delivers what one critic calls “another ferociously committed performance” – is up for anything.
“In my defence, I was drunk,” Skarsgard says with a chuckle. “The movie was part of Sundance’s midnight section so, unlike other festivals, where you have the premiere and go to parties afterwards, this was the reverse of that. So we went to a couple of parties. Afterwards on the red carpet one of the journalists had brought an S&M leather collar with a leash and gave it to us. And of course I was like, ‘I need to wear that, that’s great’, so I threw it on. And we had a blast.”
Thankfully the actor, who previously had ditched his trousers on the red carpet at the 2016 MTV movie awards (that photo is now his profile pic on IMDB) did not bring the prosthetic penis used in Infinity Pool.
“We had a lot of fun playing around with prosthetics; the movie is pretty graphic,” says Skarsgard, who exchanged pictures with a British prosthetics maker as they decided on the right look.
The death of his character in the movie caused Skarsgard to think about his own mortality.
“I think it’s quite interesting because mortality is obviously scary and it’s the subject,” he says of Infinity Pool.
“Our own death is something we’re also kind of stigmatised by in our society. We don’t talk much about it and we’re tiptoeing around it. In other cultures, death is part of life and it’s part of rebirth and we’re very uncomfortable talking about the subject matter.
“So it was interesting to have a character coming literally face-to-face with his own mortality and watching his own demise and what that will do to him psychologically. We’re watching someone who is quite, I wouldn’t say a broken character, but he’s definitely not in touch with his own feelings.”
Skarsgard splits his time between New York, where he has spent the past 20 years, and Stockholm, where he was born and now owns an apartment. He is the eldest of eight children to leading Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard, who had an explicit sex scene in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac Volume 2. As Alexander grows older, he increasingly looks like his tall, blond dad. So the concept of cloning may not be strange to him, since he’s from a family of look-alikes, including younger brother Bill, an actor who starred in the Hollywood hit It.
“Yeah, I’m very familiar with it,” Skarsgard says in agreement. He says all his siblings still live in the Stockholm district of Sodermalm, where they grew up, and that six of Stellan’s children are actors.
Skarsgard started acting at age eight and worked in Swedish productions until he was 16. But it was not his intention to pursue acting as a career.
“It was not to rebel against my father – I just wanted to have a normal job, to wear a grey suit and drive a Saab 9000 to work, like my buddy’s dad, because I felt that was a real job,” he says.
“But, really, I didn’t know what I wanted to do after I finished school. I’d grown up in a very bohemian family and wasn’t exposed to the elements. Looking back, I had an amazing childhood. It was almost like a commune with the whole extended family living within a few blocks of each other. There would be a composer, a poet, actors and people walking around with caftans or naked, drinking red wine and reciting poems.
“But I said, ‘I’m gonna go in the complete opposite direction’, which would have been to join the military and I decided to do that.”
At 19 he enlisted and served in an elite counter-terrorism unit of the Swedish navy. He left in 1996 and a year later studied acting in New York. Afterwards he returned to act in small Swedish productions and, on a holiday trip to Los Angeles, his father’s agent suggested he try an audition.
He was cast in Ben Stiller’s very silly 2001 film Zoolander. After many further failed US auditions, he had his English-language break starring as a marine sergeant in the 2008 HBO well-reviewed miniseries Generation Kill, which led to his now famous role in True Blood.
Broad-shouldered and muscular, Skarsgard soon became a Hollywood heart-throb, but he hated the attention his celebrity brought to his love life and he still will not discuss it.
He had relationships with Kate Bosworth, his co-star in the 2011 remake of Straw Dogs, and with Alexa Chung, a British television presenter, model and fashion designer. Last year he welcomed his first child, with Swedish actor Tuva Novotny.
On screen, Skarsgard has enjoyed acting alongside Australian women and famously played Tarzan to Margot Robbie’s Jane in 2016’s The Legend of Tarzan. While he likewise had fun working with Coleman on Infinity Pool, his strongest Aussie connection has been with Kidman, first on Big Little Lies (2017-19).
“To go into that darkness with Nicole was really something special,” he says. “We really became quite close during that. There was so much love and trust that we talked a lot about trying to find something else to collaborate on.
“So when we were putting together The Northman, Nicole was obviously the dream Queen Gudrun. I reached out and asked if she would be interested and I was thrilled when she came on board. It’s another very dark, very twisted relationship,” he says of his character, a prince obsessed with saving his mother. The film is based on a Viking legend that Shakespeare drew on for Hamlet.
“I commit myself to the projects I do and I throw myself into them with force and excitement and enthusiasm, and Nicole does that too,” Skarsgard says. “That’s part of the reason we really connect.”
Will there be a third project? “We did say, ‘Let’s try for one, but let’s find a nice rom-com, where we’re on a warm sunny beach and we’re having a great time.’ Like we’re not trying to kill each other, there’s no incestuous relationship, just like a buddy movie. So we’re waiting for that script to come in.”
Is that likely to happen?
“Maybe not,” Skarsgard replies with a mischievous grin. “But I’ll do anything with Nicole. I adore her.”
Infinity Pool opens in cinemas on May 11, and screens at the Fantastic Film Festival on April 28 (Sydney) and 29 (Melbourne). Succession is on Foxtel and Binge.
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