Alexander Skarsgård

Press & Interviews - Blood and Guts

It's a little funny to see Alexander Skarsgård just sitting there in the sunshine. The 35-year-old Swede is best known for playing Eric Northman, the 1,000-year-old Viking vampire sheriff on HBO's True Blood. The last time his pale, undead flesh came into contact with the sun, he smoldered like an overnuked Hot Pocket. And yet here's Skarsgård, on the patio of a Manhattan cafe on a sunny summer morning, his only armor against those deadly UV rays a pair of Persol shades and a killer tan.

Skarsgård just flew in from Stockholm, where he spent the past three weeks basking in the long summer days. (True Blood wrapped its fourth season a month before, which means he no longer had to cling to the shade in his SPF 100.) He's tired and a little jet-lagged - but at least he's not drunk. Lately when he flies back from Europe he's been getting hammered the night before, so that he can sleep on the plane. But it doesn't always work. One recent post-club morning, he was awakened, rather painfully, by his dad, who was standing over his bed saying, "Shouldn't you be at the airport right now?" Even worse than when he misses his flight is when he doesn't miss it. "Flying hungover is OK," he says. "But flying fucked up? Aggghhhhh."

He orders a breakfast for a vegetarian lumberjack - spinach frittata, fresh fruit, yogurt, granola, grapefruit juice, toast, and an extra egg - and leans back in his chair with his latte. Most actors are small in person, but somehow Skarsgård seems even huger. He recently added 17 pounds of muscle to his 6-foot-4 frame for his role in Straw Dogs, out this month; now, on a patio surrounded by fashionista boys and model-looking girls, he looks positively Vike-gantic, like he's prepping to play, say, a star tight end on the Giants. Or even to play for the Giants.

He's been sitting there for a few minutes when a guy approaches. He's maybe in his early 50s, with long, thick dreadlocks and a graying beard. At first he seems like a fan, someone who recognizes Skarsgård from True Blood. But then he points right at Skarsgård and starts speaking in a voice honed on a thousand subway platforms.

"Do you believe your days on Earth will come to an end?" the man thunders.

Skarsgård is taken aback. He glances around the cafe, looking for help. "Um... hopefully not for a long time," he says, laughing nervously.

The guy doesn't laugh. Instead, he asks again: "Do you believe your days on Earth will come to an end?"

Skarsgård looks around again. The waitstaff is frozen.

"Um... I guess so."

The man scowls. "You don't guess. You know."

"OK," Skarsgård says. "I know."

"Know what?" the man asks.

"That my days on Earth will come to an end."

The guy is quiet for a minute, letting the words sink in. Finally, he speaks. "Then you're a dead man walking." And he smiles and walks away.

As it happens, Skarsgård is a dead man walking - or at least he plays one on TV. Even without a pulse, he's the hottest thing on True Blood, which, in turn, is the hottest thing on HBO (it attracts 5 million viewers an episode). His character has evolved over the past four seasons into the show's resident sex god - enjoying six-hour boning sessions with the Estonian stripper he keeps chained in his basement and baring everything but his Swedish meatballs. His commitment to the role's fleshy demands has inspired passionate devotion from the True Blood audience, including lusty tribute sites and X-rated fan fiction. Director Peter Berg, who cast Skarsgård as a naval officer in next year's Battleship, says he first became aware of the actor when "the 10 women who work in my office all collectively marched up to my desk with his picture and said, 'Alex Skarsgård will be in this movie.'"

"Of course it's flattering," Skarsgård says of the attention. "I mean, God, I'm human. But you have to be able to laugh at yourself." As a result, he's developed a self-deprecating wit when it comes to anything relating to sex. On losing his virginity? "That was 2008, I think. Best eight seconds of my life." On being voted Sexiest Man in Sweden five years running: "Every single day, I wake up and look in the mirror and think, Five times, motherfucker. Five times."

He's also won praise for Eric's occasional male-on-male dalliances, at which Skarsgård shrugs. "I think he's just tried everything there is to try," he says. "After 1,000 years, maybe he's just tired of the pussy for a while."

But the truth is, up close - and this is not to take anything away from him, because, let's face it, the dude is like a Nordic god in better jeans and styling gel - Skarsgård is actually a little awkward, with a gangly bearing and an endearingly dorky overbite. "I was surprised at how goofy he was," says Kirsten Dunst, who costars as his love interest in the upcoming Melancholia. "Almost like a puppy in a body that's too big for him. All these girls are like, 'Oh, my God, he's so hot.' But he's really such a goof."

Skarsgård's vampire on True Blood once lived on Öland, a remote island off Sweden's Baltic coast that another character described as "a windy shithole." The line was Skarsgård's idea; the joke is, he really is from there. When he was a kid, his family had a little summer place on Öland with no heat or plumbing and an outhouse for a toilet. The rest of the year they lived in Södermalm, a working-class neighborhood in Stockholm. Life was a mix of the bohemian and the professional. When Alex was nine, his mom, My, began medical school - she now runs a rehab clinic for recovering drug addicts. His dad, Stellan, had already established himself as one of the most famous actors in Sweden. A revered classical thespian, he is known in the States for diversions like Mamma Mia! and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

Unsurprisingly, Skarsgård spent a lot of time around actors as a kid. "Dad was working 16 hours a day and performing at night," he says. "If you wanted to see your old man, basically you had to hang out backstage at the theater." Alex would be in the dressing room at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, at the feet of a legend such as Max von Sydow or Ingmar Bergman. "But I was more interested in the wigs and fake noses."

Stellan remembers Alex as a happy kid. "He had an enormous amount of energy and a very gentle soul, with a great empathy for everything." At the same time, he says, "he could be very stubborn." He recalls one family trip to New York City, at the end of which he decided to treat the kids to a helicopter ride to Kennedy Airport. "Alexander was upset over some sneakers we bought him that were apparently the wrong kind," he says, "so throughout the entire chopper flight, he was sitting beside the pilot with his eyes closed." I'll show you, Dad.

Given his bloodline, it was probably inevitable that the younger Skarsgård would give acting a try. He landed a few preteen roles in some small Swedish films, and then one big role that made him a bona fide star. But when girls started sneaking into the family's apartment building and chasing him on the street, he decided he wasn't happy with the attention. "I got self-conscious," he says. "Before, I was very social and outgoing. But it made me insecure and really uncomfortable." One day when he was 13, he told his parents over breakfast that he didn't want to act anymore. His dad basically shrugged and asked him to pass the eggs.

He spent the rest of his teens like a lot of kids do, listening to punk rock and drinking beer. For a while he thought he might want to be an architect, but by the time he graduated from high school, he was bored with studying and wanted something different. "I could have, like, backpacked around Asia," he says. "But I wanted a challenge." So he joined the Swedish Navy, enlisting in the elite reconnaissance unit known as the SäkJakt (roughly, "to protect and hunt").

In those days, the biggest maritime threat to Sweden came from Russian subs. Skarsgård and his team spent most of their time patrolling the thousands of islands that make up the Stockholm archipelago. "Usually we'd be out for two weeks, just me and my men," he says. "We'd come at night in speedboats, with our dry suits and our weapons, and, under the cover of darkness, swim onto the island. Then we'd camp out somewhere, dig a hole in the dirt, and take pictures and notes."

"I felt sorry for him," says Stellan, a pacifist who got out of his own service by admitting he smoked pot. "Sleeping out in the snow; getting bossed around by less intelligent men..." But Alex enjoyed it for what it was. He relished the hardship, sought it out. He also enjoyed being on the water - to this day he likes to fish, and recently he took up surfing while filming Battleship in Hawaii. He doesn't talk about the navy much - Berg didn't even know he'd served, which seems like a funny thing in relation to a movie called Battleship - but it clearly left its mark.

That said, it also became clear that, exciting or not, living in a hole for two weeks at a time was not the way he wanted to spend his life. "Maybe that was my wake-up call," Skarsgård says, kidding but not really. "Like, Fuck this! I want a trailer. I want a PA to make me a latte every morning... I miss acting! War sucks!"

According to both Skarsgårds, Stellan tried to dissuade his son from following in his footsteps. Alex remembers very clearly one conversation where his dad sat him down for a talk. "He was like, 'I love this job, but it's fucking hard. If you have an option, if there's something else you want to do - do that instead.'" He spent a few years of relative success in Sweden, where, he has said, he "was always playing soft, misunderstood high school boys." Then, in 2000, he was visiting L.A. with his dad when an agent asked if he wanted to go on an audition. It was a tiny role - some comedy Ben Stiller was filming about male models. He mostly said yes to have a story to tell when he got home. But to Skarsgård's surprise, he got the part, and two weeks later he was in Zoolander playing Meekus, an Orange Mocha Frappuccino-loving model who perishes in an unfortunate gasoline incident.

The role provided the boost he needed to give Hollywood a try. "I was a little naive coming out there, because I'd only auditioned once, and it was for Zoolander," he says. "Like, you go in, you audition, and two weeks later you're shooting a movie in Manhattan with Ben Stiller? Easy!"

But when he moved to the States, "people obviously had no idea who I was. Being a star in Sweden is like being a star in Nebraska. They don't care." He had some close calls: He met with Tom Hanks about Band of Brothers, but couldn't do it because of scheduling; he auditioned for Angel in X-Men: The Last Stand, but the director went a different way. He also "read a lot of really, really, really bad scripts that I didn't even audition for," Skarsgård says. "I just felt like, What's the point? I still had a pretty decent career back home. I didn't come out to Hollywood to do crap. I couldn't be too picky - but I had to have some kind of integrity, and not do stuff I hated."

Ultimately, his patience paid off. In 2007 he was cast in HBO's Generation Kill, a miniseries from The Wire creator David Simon about the Marine battalion that led the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Skarsgård played Sgt. Brad "Iceman" Colbert, the unflappable team leader of Bravo Company. (Simon says that as soon as he was cast, Marines started addressing the real Sgt. Colbert as "Orange Mocha Frappuccino.") Skarsgård spent seven long months filming in the Kalahari Desert, shooting 16-hour days in broiling Humvees and bonding, he says, much like he did with his actual military buddies - an assertion borne out by the DVD commentary track, on which his costar James Ransone rhapsodizes at length about Skarsgård's... well, length. ("Oh, we have the highest respect for each other's penises," Skarsgård says when I ask about it. "We were in that desert for a loooong time.")

Simon doesn't pretend the actors did anything so far-fetched as "become Marines" during the shoot. But he says Skarsgård did display some Marine-like intensity and "a very calm warrior presence." Take, for instance, the night in South Africa he celebrated his 31st birthday.

"The actors and Marines all went out for Alex's birthday to some bar in Upington, which is like this agricultural center in the middle of fucking nowhere," Simon recalls. "I guess some trouble started with the local guys, over the attention of some local girls, and they ended up in this incredible bar fight. And Alex was, like, unstoppable. He's the nicest guy in the world, but give him a few and have somebody piss him off, and it was a fistfight, and he wasn't going home." And it wasn't some one-punch Hollywood fight, either. "He wanted to go back for more," Simon says. "It was all they could do to drag him out. Even the Marines were like, 'He threw down!'"

Typically, Skarsgård leads a much more domestic existence. He has a house in the Hollywood Hills, where he likes to drink good Scotch (Oban, Laphroaig) and cook when he can. His specialty is coq au vin. "A man should be able to make a nice coq au vin," he insists. He also hosts an annual party in which he serves his guests a homemade Swedish spiced wine called glögg. He likes bowling and is intense about ping-pong, but his recreational pursuits are otherwise limited to supporting his beloved Hammarby, the Chicago Cubs of Swedish soccer. And he's been linked to starlets like Amanda Seyfried and Evan Rachel Wood, but declines to say if he's seeing anyone now. "I promise," he says, "I'll call you when I get engaged."

His life in New York, meanwhile, is a little more exciting. He likes New York because it reminds him of Europe - the way you can walk outside and be surrounded by culture at every turn.

After breakfast, we get up to take a walk. It's only then that we see the phalanx of photographers who have been camped out near the cafe entrance for the past half hour. Skarsgård freezes mid-step. He asks, "Do you want to walk the other way?"

As we turn and head back up the street, the paparazzi race around to get their shot. Skarsgård is suddenly tense, his face red and flushed. He resorts to one-word answers: Do you think they've been there the whole time? Yeah. Do you ever talk to them? No. You really don't like this, do you? No.

Meanwhile, the paparazzi try to get his attention:

"Alexander, what's going on?"

"Alexander, look up for one second?"

"Smile for me, Alexander!"

"Alexander, over here!"

They get their shots in a few seconds and head off in search of their next quarry. But it takes Skarsgård a long time to settle down. He hates this stuff, he says. "Especially if they've got a video camera - then you can't give them shit. Because they have all those shows: 'We asked him this, and he said this!' Better to just shut the fuck up." He yearns to be taken seriously, but it's hard for people to see past his face.

Conveniently enough, Skarsgård's latest role lets him have his beefcake and eat it, too. Straw Dogs is a remake of the 1971 classic, which starred Dustin Hoffman as a mathematician pushed to the breaking point by a group of small-town thugs. Grim and blood-soaked, it's a meditation on masculinity and vengeance that the critic Pauline Kael once declared a "fascist work of art." In the original, Skarsgård's character, a laborer named Charlie, is a brutish, two-dimensional galoot. But in the update, Skarsgård manages to make him almost sympathetic.

The film's most infamous moment occurs when Charlie breaks into the home of the mathematician (played by James Marsden in the remake) and rapes his wife, Amy, with whom Charlie once had a fling. It's a gut-wrenching scene, unflinching in its eye for human brutality. But Skarsgård finds it tough for another reason. "I think it's fuckin' sad," he says. "Because Charlie thinks this is not rape. He thinks she wants this: 'She belongs with me - this is it, here we are, together forever.' And that look between them where she's like, Get off me... It kills him."

Complicating matters further is the fact that Amy is played by Kate Bosworth, whom Skarsgård dated for two years before their breakup earlier this year. "At the time we were just friends," he says. "She was just a fellow actor." Ultimately, though, the lesson he took from the role was "how crazy love can make you." He says, "I don't fall often, but I fall hard. And when you fall hard, it takes a while to get up."

Skarsgård says he often takes lessons from the complex characters he plays. "I learn stuff about myself all the time, playing Eric. About darkness, and about guilt. About being guarded, and keeping people at arm's length, not letting people who love you in. I think there's a darkness in all of us - under the wrong circumstances, we're all capable of some pretty horrible things. And it's important to acknowledge that. You meet a lot of people where you can see the lid on, and it's boiling underneath, but there's just a big smile and everything's fantastic. That's scary to me."

Skarsgård has a knack for nestling into the deep crevices in a character's psyche, for making sociopathy and rage seem like sexy fun. And yet for all his talk about darkness and walls, he seems well-adjusted, endlessly cheerful, and eminently lacking in damage. Which, for one thing, means he's probably a pretty good actor. But it also raises the question: How does he deal with his demons?

Skarsgård just shrugs. "Well, I eat people for a living. That helps."

Strolling through downtown, we somehow land on the subject of Matthew McConaughey's movie The Lincoln Lawyer. "I was up for a part in that," he says.

I ask what happened. "I read the script, and... there was a rape scene." He lets out a slow sigh. "It wasn't even six months after we shot Straw Dogs. You don't really want to be known as 'the rapist,' you know? 'Oh - you need a rapist? Alex Skarsgård's your guy! He'll rape like no one else!'"

He's joking, obviously. But he does spend a lot of time thinking about the public's perception of him. "I'm at a place in my career where I need to show people what I want to be doing," he says. "I have a great opportunity where, as long as I'm on the show, I know I have a job in December. So I can afford to say no to stuff and go after these little cool projects that I feel really passionate about."

That means movies like Melancholia, due out next month, which he shot last year in Sweden with Danish art-house provocateur Lars von Trier. (You might remember it as the movie von Trier was promoting at Cannes a few months back when he compared himself to a Nazi.) Skarsgård is excited about it, because it's a new kind of role for him - his character, Michael, meekly puts up with the type of manipulative betrayals that would lead Eric Northman to eviscerate people. He's a complete 180 from the tough guys he's used to playing, and Skarsgård loves him all the more for it. "He's got vulnerability, and that's something I really admire."

Still, it was hard for him to disappear into the role completely. "I remember there was a scene where he had to get undressed," recalls costar Dunst. "Alex took off his pants and shirt, and Lars stopped the take. He said, 'Uh-uh. Keep the shirt on. Too good-looking.'"

Skarsgård figures he has maybe two more years on True Blood, and then it'll be time to try something new. He's already laying the groundwork: Last summer he shot his first big-budget action flick, Battleship, due out next spring. But what about all that talk about doing things for love and not money? Granted, he probably didn't get the kind of money the battleship got, but is he really prepared to defend the artistic integrity of a $200 million alien movie based on a board game?

He pauses for a minute. "I haven't seen the movie, so I have no idea if it's any good. I'd heard horror stories about these huge movies, how you're not allowed to have fun, and it's all about 'Show up and say your lines so we can get to the explosions.' But I met with Pete [Berg], and he basically told me, 'What you're worried about will never be a problem.' And he delivered. If there was a scene I wasn't crazy about, or something I wanted to change, he'd say, 'Write me something.' Like I said, I haven't seen it. But I had fun. All I can do is defend what I did."

The other big project he has in the works is closer to his heart. Recently he came up with an idea for a Viking movie and pitched it to Warner Bros. They loved it and bought it. He plans to star in the film himself and is hoping to get it into production soon. "I want to make it legit," he says. "Filthy, dirty, maybe a beheading. It's gonna be a fun little adventure."

Of his career in general, Skarsgård says, "I'm just trying to be smart about it. I want to work in Hollywood for a long time." Right now that means taking roles like the one in What Maisie Knew - an adaptation of the Henry James novella and the reason he's in New York - and not, say, the role of the generically handsome guy in the latest Katherine Heigl rom-com. One, because that's not very interesting, and two, because quick, name that guy. "You tend to get a lot of offers that are, like, the hot guy," Skarsgård says, "and those parts aren't very fun. I hope there's something more to me than my pecs."

It's a noble battle he's fighting - but also an uphill one. At one point, we happen across a cute little scene: the female half of a wedding party, spilling out of a hotel lobby on their way to the ceremony. "Hey, look at this!" Skarsgård says. One by one the women clamber across the sidewalk and into the street, navigating drainage grates in their ivory heels. Skarsgård watches them in silence, like he's trying to piece something together.

"I want to be, like, drunk and bitter now," he says after they pass. The line feels odd: It sounds less like something he'd say than what he thinks a guarded, serious actor would say. He laughs to himself and pretends to heckle them under his breath: "Love is an illusion! You'll be divorced in six months! Enjoy it while it lasts!"

But the women don't hear him. Instead, as they climb into their waiting limo, all you can make out is their chorus of excited whispers: "It's him! It's him! It's him!"