Alexander Skarsgård: 'I love playing flawed heroes'

From new post-war film Aftermath to Godzilla vs Kong, Alexander Skarsgård has range. The smouldering Swede tells Craig McLean about being single and Big Little Lies rumours 
Swede dreams: Alexander Skarsgård
Redux / eyevine
Craig McLean2 March 2019

It’s early Sunday morning on Park Lane and Alexander Skarsgård and I are comparing fuzzy heads. I’m suffering after a Saturday night in Shoreditch — “Oh, that’s a good neighbourhood,” he says eagerly, very much the party-hearty Swede — and the actor had dinner and drinks in… “Where the f*** did we go?” he frowns, his eyes pouchy (just a bit). “Mayfair somewhere.”

To be fair, the award-winning star of HBO’s Big Little Lies and the BBC’s The Little Drummer Girl has “killer jet lag”, having just flown in from the other side of the world.

“I arrived from Australia yesterday and I have the premiere tomorrow night, then I leave for Australia again on Tuesday morning,” says Skarsgård, an oak-like presence, 6ft 4ins and a boyish 42 years old. “Do you want some coffee by the way?”

Most actors wedged into a suite at The Dorchester at breakfast o’clock on a Sunday, kicking off 48 hours of promotion for their new film, aren’t nearly this solicitous. Especially when they’re on a working weekend away from the three-month shoot of a blockbuster movie — Godzilla vs Kong — that’s being made pretty much as far away from London as you can get.

Nicole Kidman in Big Little Lies

This, though, is Skarsgård all over: committed. He did seven seasons on vampire drama True Blood becoming, in the process, almost as big a star as his dad, Stellan Skarsgård (Cinderella, The Avengers). To carry off an eight-pack in a loincloth in The Legend of Tarzan (2016) he became a slave to the gym and protein. Shooting Big Little Lies, in which he played Nicole Kidman’s violently abusive husband, he worked hard with the actress to choreograph their fight scenes.

“We had to,” he says in smooth, American-accented English born of two decades based there, “because it was dangerous if we didn’t. Nicole is committed and wanted to do almost everything on her own [without a stunt double]. You saw the show — it’s violent. I had to throw her over tables and chairs. So you find a structure, but you obviously want to be loose when you shoot it. So it doesn’t feel like we’re going through the motions. You have to release and go with it.”

That dedication won Skarsgård an Emmy, SAG and Golden Globe awards. It won Kidman something very different. As her husband, musician Keith Urban, told me last year: “She had the bruises to show for it.”

“She was purple after that,” says Skarsgård now. “But she would still be like, ‘All right, let’s go again’. It was tough to shoot those scenes.”

Skarsgård with Flora Thiemann and Keira Knightley in The Aftermath
Skarsgård with Flora Thiemann and Keira Knightley in The Aftermath

Skarsgård is similarly invested in his new film, The Aftermath, a post-Second World War drama set in Hamburg, in which he stars alongside Keira Knightley. He plays a German architect who has to give over his grand home to the occupying powers, in the shape of a British officer (Jason Clarke) and his wife (Knightley).

Everyone is suffering: the starving civilians of bomb-shattered Hamburg, grieving Skarsgård (his character lost his wife in the bombing) and haunted Knightley (her son was killed in the Blitz). You may not be surprised to learn that a desperate love affair soon blooms. The notably thoughtful leading man, though, locked on to another aspect of the story.

“This guy is broken. I also loved that he’s not a hero — he doesn’t have a monologue about how he was part of the resistance and fought against Hitler. He is stuck there and keeps his head down. He is conflicted, and that was interesting to me. My issue with Second World War movies or literature is that they’re rarely nuanced. It’s black and white, the good Allies versus the evil Germans. As if 70 million Germans were bad? I don’t find that psychologically interesting and I don’t subscribe to that narrative.

Skarsgård and I talked last year when he was promoting The Little Drummer Girl, the John le Carré adaptation that didn’t quite pack the punch of its predecessor, The Night Manager. But he and co-star Florence Pugh were terrific together. And this despite the pair only meeting for the first time, he told me, “in the make-up trailer on set in London a week before we started shooting”.

He had more of a head start at chemistry with Knightley, having met her a decade previously while visiting his dad on the Los Angeles set of Pirates of the Caribbean.

“Both Jason and Keira are very confident people. But they don’t have big egos. So it was about whatever served the story and the plot, not what would give them an opportunity to shine. It wasn’t ‘me, me, me, me, me’. I’ve worked with actors like that and I find it incredibly frustrating. But Keira has none of that. So it was such a joy.”

It seems like being in London was in itself a factor in persuading him to commute today from Sydney. Skarsgård knows the city well, having spent time here after starting a relationship with Alexa Chung in 2015.

“London Fields is my favourite. But for both Tarzan and Little Drummer Girl I stayed around Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove and Holland Park — they were both shot on the west side, and to do a daily commute through London is just a nightmare. On Tarzan I didn’t have a social life — it was just about filming and training and eating and sleeping. So it was perfect to be in west London — less distraction and less temptation!”

Despite his globetrotting schedule he’s abreast of Brexit. Well, as much as anyone is. A second referendum, Skarsgård reasons, “could lead to a terrible situation — a Remain vote will create even more tension in the country, and an uprising, and riots. That could turn very, very bloody.”

"Hanging out with a giant lizard and a giant ape in Godzilla vs Kong was just what I needed"

Alexander Skarsgård

That same schedule means he’s currently single and is looking forward to some time off in his new Stockholm apartment after Godzilla vs Kong — although that monster-mash movie is proving a tonic after a run of projects with “very intense subject matter. Hanging out with a giant lizard and a giant ape was just what I needed right now.”

What, though, can he tell us of series two of Big Little Lies? The rumours are that his character, despite being dead, reappears. “I just can’t say much about it,” Skarsgård grins. “I’ve read the scripts, I think it’s a great story, and the fact that they would inject Meryl [Streep] into it as my mother — it just creates an interesting dynamic. Am I in it in flashback? I guess we’ll all find out in summer,” he smiles.

Anyway, before all that, he has a film to promote and a red carpet to walk. “On a movie like this, where you’ve had a great time, with people that you genuinely love, the premiere is like a high school reunion — although I saw Keira a couple of times when I shot Big Little Lies here,” he says.

What’s that? He is in Big Little Lies 2, and it’s partly set in London? Or was that the jet lag talking and he meant his other TV show with “Little” in the title? Roll on June…

The Aftermath is in cinemas from tomorrow

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