Scandinavian Film Festival: Stellan Skarsgard stars in Hope, a ‘funny’ cancer movie

Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard drew on personal experience in his new film.

Swedish star Stellan Skarsgard is one of the funniest and nicest people to interview. Don’t ask him about turning 70 on June 13, however, as he remains perennially young at heart.

“It’s nothing to celebrate, I won’t do an interview about that,” he told a Swedish colleague. “You can write what the hell you want.”

The actor, who made his name in Ingmar Bergman’s Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm and went on to appear in myriad Hollywood blockbusters — including Good Will Hunting, Thor, two Avengers movies, two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, Mamma Mia!, its sequel and the upcoming Dune, as well as HBO’s mini-series Chernobyl – now appears in a Norwegian film, Hope, which makes its Australian premiere in the Scandinavian Film Festival.

Interestingly, Nicole Kidman’s production company, Blossom Films, has teamed with Amazon Studios for a series remake of Hope, after the film’s strong reception. Kidman will play the main character, who is diagnosed with cancer, and is based on the experience of miraculous survivor Maria Sodahl, the wife of Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland, with whom Skarsgard has made six films. (Of course Kidman appeared in Lars von Trier’s Dogville, one of six films Skarsgard made with the Danish director.)

What makes Hope fascinating, and highly personal, is that Sodahl writes and directs while Skarsgard plays Tomas, a character based on her husband.

“I’m basically playing Hans Petter in the film, but I’m not really playing him – he’s so slow so it would be boring,” Skarsgard muses of one of his closest friends. “I promised him I would improve his reputation.”

The film, like the series, focuses on a period around Christmas as the central character, here named Anja, is given a probable death sentence. As with Sodahl and Moland, the couple have six children between them and the film focuses both on the children’s reaction as well as the couple’s tenuous marriage.

Hardly knowing how to respond upon hearing his wife’s diagnosis, the shell-shocked Tomas does not say a great deal, but does the best that he can. The film shows the love the couple had forgotten amid all their work commitments. “The hard thing was to make sure that there was life and a relationship in every scene,” Skarsgard says.

Initially when Sodahl approached him for the role, he was hesitant: “Oh, not another cancer movie.” However, upon reading a synopsis he was surprised it was funny.

“Most of the time the Anja character is weird and strange and not altogether pleasant, but I decided Maria had enough distance from the material to be able to make it work. It’s actually full of hope.”

Skarsgard has a personal relationship with the story as his first wife, My, the mother of his first six children, including Hollywood heartthrob Alexander and IT’s Bill, also survived a cancer diagnosis. “Being a husband to a cancer patient is not an easy thing, because you cannot participate. I fled into practical things, like looking after our six kids. I couldn’t even sit properly and hold her hand and give her support because sometimes she didn’t want it. There’s a helplessness that I could relate to very much.”

He felt right at home, though, in the family scenes. “It was fantastic coming into that set in their apartment, because it had layers of life throughout the years. And of course they have six kids and I have eight!”

Skarsgard is playing, quite literally, a supporting role in the film, which belongs to Anja, who is impeccably portrayed by Andrea Braein Hovig.

Skarsgard takes an even smaller role as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in the big-screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction novel, Dune, which will premiere in Venice. “The film is very visual, I mean it’s directed by Denis Villeneuve,” he says of the French-Canadian filmmaker whose credits include Arrival and Sicario. “What I can tell you is that I’m fat. They can’t sue me for that because it’s in the book. I’m fatter than I could be eating my way into, so I have a fat suit.”

It must have been tough for the actor, who, like his liberal parents before him, likes to walk around his home in the nude.

“It’s nice and comfortable. It’s very hard to make me blush over that,” he says of his habit, which is widely known in Sweden.

It’s also very hard to find a happier family life than Skarsgard’s. Alexander, his eldest son once told me his dad is his best friend and although he is currently filming the third season of Succession in New York, and has an apartment there, he still lives in Stockholm. His tall, handsome good looks, which he inherited from his father, made him the sexiest of vampires on HBO’s True Blood, and he also won a 2017 supporting actor Emmy for his portrayal as Kidman’s abusive husband in HBO’s Big Little Lies. Perhaps following in the family tradition, he presented a 2016 MTV award in his underpants, as an ode to the Tarzan character he played at the time.

Stellan now has two young sons from his second marriage to 45-year-old Irish-American screenwriter and producer Megan Everett. He has had a vasectomy. “Eight children is enough,” he chuckles. “Our family is very tight. All my kids and both my wives live within five minutes’ walking distance. We have meals together all the time. I love to cook.”

Over the years Skarsgard has received numerous awards in Scandinavia and won a Golden Globe and was nominated for a coveted Emmy for HBO mini-series Chernobyl. “My sons can’t have it all to themselves,” he chuckles. “Chernobyl is very much like a movie, the quality of the script and everything is cinematic.”

The politically conscious actor plays Ukrainian Soviet politician Boris Shcherbina, who was the caretaker of the 1986 Chernobyl accident and clean-up, even if he didn’t know about nuclear reactors.

“The serious problem is not nuclear energy, because it can actually be extremely efficient and safe from hazards,” says Skarsgard. “The problem is humans. The Soviet system had this idea of perfection and if you have a system that is supposed to be perfect, it can’t be criticised, which means that all flaws are denied.”

As versatile as ever, he has just wrapped another highly secretive role in the Star Wars series, Andor, a prequel to Rogue One.

 Hope screens as part of The Scandinavian Film Festival across Australia in July and August: