“Alexander Skarsgård” Transformed Into ‘an Absolute Beast’ for Robert Eggers’ ‘The Northman’
Eggers’ new film includes at least one scene where Alexander Skarsgård rips open someone’s mouth with his teeth.
Robert Eggers is in post-production on his 10th century Viking epic “The Northman,” but cast member Ralph Ineson is not waisting any time in sharing his belief the film will be “a bit of a masterpiece.” Ineson starred in Eggers’ breakthrough directorial debut “The Witch” and now stars alongside Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Nicole Kidman, Willem Dafoe, Claes Bang, and Björk in “The Northman.” The project is Eggers’ third directorial feature and follows “The Lighthouse.”
“It’s an enormous movie,” Ineson recently told NME. “I saw a four-minute montage of some of the stuff they’d already shot and I was really blown away. The marriage of Rob Eggers’ imagination and Viking folklore…Jesus, man.”
“The Northman” stars Skarsgård in a Viking revenge saga set in Iceland at the turn of the 10th century. Eggers co-wrote the script with Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón. In his interview with NME, Ineson teased Skarsgård’s monstrous physical transformation for the lead role.
Eggers has long touted “The Northman” as the biggest and most ambitious film of his career to date, which is saying something considering the laborious historical accuracy he brought to “The Witch” and “The Lighthouse.” The director told Film Independent last April that the scale of “The Northman” was so huge he had to change his prep process, bringing in other people for the first time to help him crack the look of the film as opposed to his normal process of crafting the look all by himself.
“We’re designing all these worlds, building these villages, we’re making thousands of costumes and props,” Eggers added at the time, hinting at the massive scope.
Focus Features will release “The Northman” domestically, while Universal Pictures will distribute internationally. No release date is set at this time.
Alexander Skarsgård: ‘Hollywood is very silly. People are so anxious’
When Alexander Skarsgård was 20 years old, half his lifetime ago, he decided to give acting a shot. At the time, he had left his native Sweden for Leeds — “of all places” — and was studying English at what’s now called Leeds Beckett University. It was a toss-up between training to be an actor or an architect. “I was like most people that age, trying to figure out what to do,” he recalls. “And it was kind of: ‘Fuck it, Dad’s an actor, he’s super-happy doing it, maybe I should give it a go.’ I felt like, if I don’t try it now, there is a risk that I’ll look back 30, 40 years from now and think: ‘Why didn’t I? What an idiot!’
“Yeah,” Skarsgård goes on, smiling, “I’d like to be able to say it was a calling, that creatively I was just driven to do it, but um… I wasn’t.”
Two decades on, it turns out not to have been Skarsgård’s worst decision. In his first American film, he played a vacuous male model in Zoolander (“Earth to Meekus”), but that was followed by a fallow period: “For two and a half years, I didn’t work.”
The drought finally broke in 2007 when he landed a role as a US Marine in the Ed Burns and David Simon-led mini-series Generation Kill about the invasion of Iraq and then the big one, a recurring part as the mighty Eric Northman, the 1,000-year-old bar owner and “sheriff” in the cult hit True Blood.
“When they called me and said: ‘Oh, do you want to audition for this vampire Viking thing?’ I didn’t expect that show to last for seven years.” He laughs so hard he almost spits his lunch across the table. “Never thought that would happen.”
Since True Blood finished in 2014, the 41-year-old Skarsgård has been an eight-packed modern incarnation of Tarzan, and he has recently won an Emmy and a Golden Globe for his portrayal of a charming yet sinister wife abuser in the eight-part television drama Big Little Lies.
Skarsgård has become so successful that he’s in effect made himself homeless. On the day we meet, in the gilded surrounds of Hotel Le Meurice in Paris, he is on a brief stopover between Hamburg, where he’s been shooting with Keira Knightley, and Calgary, Canada, where his next film starts. The gaps between his last four projects were so small that he gave up his apartment in New York and put all his belongings in storage.
“I’m not married and I don’t have kids, and I’m really enjoying it at the moment,” says Skarsgård. “There’s something quite Buddhist about the sense that you can only have eight items or whatever. Because I have my one suitcase and whatever doesn’t fit in that, I can’t bring. So the other day, I wanted to buy a pair of sneakers and I realised they’re not going to fit in the suitcase, so I have to decide, how badly do I want them? Because if I buy these, I have to leave the other pair. So in terms of consumption, it really makes you think.”
Skarsgård looks down: his slouchy V-neck tee and denim incongruous in the opulent, high-ceilinged Le Meurice. “So you’ll see me wearing the same T-shirt and the same jeans now for the next six months,” he says.
The size of a tree and strapping with it, outlandishly handsome even by Scandinavian standards, Skarsgård could easily have gone down the path of the himbo. But the reality, in person, is that he is both too smart and too silly for that to happen. He takes glee in pricking the pomposity of Hollywood and telling you how “crazy” most of the people are there. When he’s given a plus one for work trips, he prefers not to take an agent or a publicist, but a friend from back home: “A pot-smoking musician from Gothenburg.” On his Instagram feed (@rexdanger: “Danger is my maiden name”), he’ll post a picture of the Eiffel Tower with the caption: “When in Rome”; another recent image seems to show him urinating against a wall.
Alexander Skarsgård as Eric Northman in True Blood.
It’s not all jokes. Skarsgård will talk with intensity about the nine months he spent getting into shape for Tarzan: the relentless gym and dance sessions, the six precisely weighed meals a day, most of them tuna. But he’s not by nature the self-denying type: as soon as the movie wrapped, he spent three days on a couch eating mozzarella and bone marrow and drinking wine. For lunch now, he has a plate of Dover sole the size of a dustbin lid, but when I suggest that he’s taken the healthy option, he looks mortified: “No, no, no, there’s a lot of butter on this little guy.”
Today, the main item on the agenda, in theory, is Skarsgård’s new sci-fi movie Mute, directed by Duncan Jones. The word “long-awaited” often flies around, but this is the real deal. A screenplay was written in 2003 by Jones, David Bowie’s son, and he planned for it to be his first film. But the budget requirements for the ambitious futuristic setting made that unworkable, so instead Jones made Moon, a scaled-back tale that starred Sam Rockwell as a helium-3 miner on the far side of the moon. That won him a Bafta in 2010 for the outstanding debut by a British filmmaker.
Mute, which Jones calls “a companion piece to Moon”, has since become “my Don Quixote”, a nod to the Terry Gilliam film that became a lightning rod for shambolic misfortune. In the intervening years, Jones has also made a couple of other films and had a turbulent period personally, including having a baby, his wife’s successful battle with cancer and the deaths of both his father and Marion, the woman who raised him.
