‘T
hat cemetery is where I’ll
end up one day,” Alexander
Skarsgard says, looking out to
the yellow Katarina Church in
Stockholm. With blue skies
above it, the colours match his
country’s flag. He grew up streets away,
but mostly lives in the US, where he
made his name in Zoolander and The
Legend of Tarzan, plus the television
shows True Blood and Big Little Lies.
Oh, and Succession. He left his country
20 years ago, to become the screen
hunk who brings more to a role than big
hunks tend to. Yet as we look out to the
graveyard, it seems that you can take the
Swede out of Sweden, but even the most
successful ones come back in the end.
He is sprawled on the sofa, legs
spread like cranes. This is how he has
to sit. The man is 6ft 3in. We have met
to talk about The Northman, a violent,
strange, brilliant Viking blockbuster
with Nicole Kidman as Skarsgard’s dif-
ficult mother. But first a word on those
Swedes because, for a country of just
ten million people, they really do
punch above their weight in the world.
Within minutes the actor mentions
Abba, Vikings and Greta Thunberg. It is
Swedish bingo. The tech pioneers Daniel
Ek (Spotify creator) and Markus Persson
(Minecraft) crop up. As does Skarsgard’s
famous actor father, Stellan. Only Max
Martin, who has written 25 US No 1s, is
missing from this full house of Swedish
soft power.
Skarsgard cycled past Greta on his
way to meet me; she was on a protest.
“She’s how we sell our country now,”
he reflects. “And I almost hit her with
my bike.” Skarsgard smiles. “Greta is
like a modern-day Viking — and, like
Greta, the Vikings refused to fly.”
Skarsgard’s childhood was very
Swedish. When he was a boy he
played next to Viking rune stones
on the island of Oland, and was
allowed to pick Viking middle namesfor his younger brothers. For the first
he chose Adolf, before his folks said no.
Instead he went with Orm — which
means snake. “I was used to being the
oldest child and had a lot of attention,”
he explains. “Then there was somebody
cuter than me, so I called him snake.”
He gave his other brother the name of
a god whose brains are smashed into
the sky. Still, the runes were magical to
him, inscribed with Vikings who went
to far-flung places.
No wonder Skarsgard was picked for
Succession. If you need television short-
hand for somebody young and a match
for a business behemoth like Logan Roy,
make them Swedish. Skarsgard’s Lukas
Matsson is a rude revelation as the chief
executive of the streaming platformCOVER STORY
The star of Tarzan, Big Little Lies and now Succession,
Alexander Skarsgard is deeper than he looks.
He talks peacocking billionaires, Swedish soft power —
and nearly running over Greta Thunberg
GoJo, who may well have brought down
the Roy media empire. The actor does
not yet know if he is back for series
four, but the word is that he will be.
The best scenes in series three were
with Matsson and Logan Roy (Brian
Cox) in the garden of an Italian villa. The
men discuss takeovers until Logan
begins a monologue about America...
“And Matsson drifts off,” Skarsgard
says, laughing. “He is bored. There are all
these sycophants in Logan’s life, includ-
ing his kids — he is a demigod. So what
is funny is when he talks about America,
instead of going, ‘Tell me more!’ Matsson
goes, ‘He talks a lot. I don’t really need
him. He’s old and kind of boring.’”
It is a great role. But Skarsgard did not
always have it so easy. Born in 1976, he
started acting at seven, before quitting
at 13. He had found fame in a TV show,
but it was tough to have people talk
about who you are when you do not
yet know yourself. National service
followed, and then six months at Leeds
Met studying English and living with a
drug dealer. “I basically just hung out
and had fun.” Then, seven years after he
gave it up, he returned to acting.
“Dad was happy,” Skarsgard says. His
father also made it big abroad in every-
thing from Good Will Hunting to Mamma
Mia!. “He’d come home from set when I
was young and I’d think, ‘If he is having
that much fun on a Monday morning,
why am I against being an actor?’”
The visionary and bonkers Northman
is his hardest role to date. Skarsgard is
Amleth, a Viking prince avenging his
father. In one extraordinary raid
Skarsgard is half-naked, half-wolf, trip-
ping, taking a chunk out of someone’s
throat. He is naked and bloody a lot.
Think the superb and ghastly Belaru-
sian war film Come and See meets the
vivid horror of Midsommar. Yet still you
won’t be prepared for a nude Ethan
Hawke barking like a dog. I am stag-
gered, in an age of franchises, that this
$90 million, weird violent epic was
made. “So am I,” Skarsgard says.
Still, Amleth is exactly the sort of role
that Skarsgard wants. A wish-fulfilment
part that marries the Viking history that
beguiled him as a boy with the chal-JONATHAN
DEAN
‘Naked and
bloody a lot’
Skarsgard, right,
in The Northman;
above, as
Matsson in
Succession
and, left,
The Legend
of TarzanJONATHAN OLLEY/WARNER BROS, GRAEME HUNTER/HBO‘I was labelled a dude w
lenging work that he did not get at the
start of his career. After scoring a role
in Ben Stiller’s fashion comedy Zoolan-
der in 2001, offers dried up. “I was left
auditioning to play the boyfriend of a
girl who gets killed in scene four of a
low-budget horror movie,” he says of
Hollywood. In Sweden he worked in
films that barely paid enough to buy a
ticket back to LA. That must have beenI don’t have to work.
I’ve made enough
money. I could retire6 3 April 2022