Alexander Skarsgard on Meloncholia, True Blood, and More

Voted ‘Sweden’s Sexiest Man’ five times, Alexander Skarsgard became a breakout star on HBO’s True Blood and, with his complex role in Lars von Trier’s masterpiece Melancholia, is ready for his closeup. The actor opens up to Marlow Stern about his early role in Zoolander, dating co-stars, how his naval background prepared him for next summer’s Battleship opposite Rihanna, and more.


When Sookie Stackhouse, the protagonist of Charlaine Harris’s The Southern Vampire Mysteries series of novels, first lays eyes on the chiseled, naked body of Eric Northman, she remarks, “if there were an international butt competition, Eric would win, hands down—or cheeks up.”

On the hit HBO series True Blood, adapted from Harris’s books, Northman, a vainglorious Viking-cum-vampire, is played with great panache—and frequent nakedness—by Alexander Skarsgard, a blond, 6-foot-4 actor whose slight bags under his eyes only seem to augment his power to “glamour,” or hypnotize. The hunky role isn’t too much of a stretch for Skarsgard, who was voted “Sweden’s Sexiest Man” five times in a row, much to his actor-father Stellan’s chagrin.


“He pushed me off that throne and I’ll never forgive him,” the elder Skarsgard told The Daily Beast. “I was Sweden’s sexiest man once and then my son comes and becomes it five times in a row just to show Daddy.”


Now, after melting the hearts of women—and some men—on HBO’s flagship show, the aesthetically pleasing younger Skarsgard is angling into more serious fare, starring alongside his father in celebrated Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, in theaters Friday. Set during and moments after Justine’s (Kirsten Dunst) wedding, the movie centers on two sisters—the depressed Justine and distraught Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg)—who struggle to grasp each other’s peculiarities, all while the Earth is about to collide with a new planet. Skarsgard plays Michael, Justine’s new husband, who hopes to fix this broken woman.Despite von Trier’s recent “I’m a Nazi” comment at Cannes, which Skarsgard told The Daily Beast was “very stupid” and a byproduct of the eccentric director’s “bizarre sense of humor,” the enthralling film is being hailed as von Trier’s masterpiece. And the effete, vulnerable Michael is a far cry from the brooding Northman, showcasing Skarsgard’s range as an actor. With a diverse array of future roles—as the victim of identity theft opposite Jason Bateman in Disconnect, an eco-anarchist alongside Ellen Page and Brit Marling in The East, and one of the leads in next summer’s $200 million-plus blockbuster Battleship, Skarsgard seems ready to make the jump from TV heartthrob to Hollywood star.


But Alexander Skarsgard never wanted to be famous.


At the age of 7, he co-starred with his father in Åke and His World, a traditional Swedish children’s story. Skarsgard played a young boy battling tuberculosis and seemed to possess an innate screen presence. “I saw that he was very good,” said Skarsgard’s father, adding, “He had very expressive eyes.” Michael Nyqvist, known for his starring role in the Swedish Girl With the Dragon Tattoofilms, lived just two blocks from the Skarsgards in south Stockholm and echoes the praise. “I knew him since he was around 7, and he has this open, honest way in everything he does,” Nyqvist told The Daily Beast.


Then, at 13, Skarsgard achieved his first lead role in the TV film The Smiling Dog. Since Sweden only had a handful of TV channels then, Skarsgard became a local sensation—and hated it.


“You want a cute girl in school to look at you because you’re cool or cute, but it made me paranoid because suddenly I just assumed that everybody looked at me because they recognized me from television and I didn’t like it,” said Skarsgard. “So I quit television and acting for eight years.”


When Skarsgard was 19 he applied to do his national service, and became team leader of a group of four men in the Royal Swedish Navy stationed on the archipelago for 18 months. The men were, according to Skarsgard, training in “anti-sabotage.” Following his military stint, Skarsgard, then 21 and attending university in England, reached a crossroads.


“I had taken eight years off of not doing anything, and like most kids that age, I got to a place where I thought I should start thinking about my future and what I wanted to do,” said Skarsgard. “I started thinking about acting again and figured I should try it before I dismiss it for good.”


So Skarsgard moved to New York City and enrolled in an acting class at Marymount Manhattan College. He fell back in love with it immediately and returned to Stockholm to sharpen his skills doing theater work.

Then he got lucky.

It was the summer of 2000, and Skarsgard was visiting his father in Los Angeles, where he was shooting The Glass House. At a family dinner, Skarsgard met his father’s manager, who said he’d send him on a series of auditions. The first one was for the role of Meekus, a dimwitted model-roommate of Ben Stiller’s title character in Zoolander who dies in a freak gasoline fight accident.

The Daily Beast