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hairbynatalienelson Premiere night in NYC! I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to watch the premiere of Murderbot Season 1 on @appletv with friends, family and incredibly talented cast and crew!!! Thank you so much @myeremadelyn @thejasminedorothy and my plus one, @iheartluxx1 for making the night extra special!!!!!
WiCnet Alexander Skarsgård | Murderbot EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW!
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New Interview.
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Alexander Skarsgard: ‘I could be a Swedish Bond’
The Succession star and son of legendary actor Stellan tells Julia Llewellyn Smith why looking like a Norse god hasn’t always been a blessing
Julia Llewellyn Smith
Saturday May 03 2025, The Times
Everyone has one question when I tell them I’ve just met Alexander Skarsgard: “Was he hot?” This, after all, is the actor voted five consecutive times Sweden’s sexiest man alive, about whom Taylor Swift allegedly composed her song Wildest Dreams with its lyric, “He’s so tall and handsome as hell,” and whose Hollywood career started with the role of Meekus, the orange mocha frappuccino-loving male model in Zoolander, to whom Ben Stiller’s character says, “Did you ever think that maybe there’s more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good-looking?”
Of the last Skarsgard is living proof. It took time, but now he’s established a career as one of the most versatile, as well as one of the buffest, actors. He gained the highest possible stamp of chattering-class approval with his role as Lukas Matsson, Succession’s Scandinavian weirdo tech billionaire, who in the last two seasons delighted in running rings around the Roy family.
And now he’s standing before me, almost parodically straight from Norse god central casting: 6ft 4in, with floppy golden hair concealed by a baseball cap, eyes which I’ve seen described as “deep as a glacial fjord” concealed behind dark glasses, his “Viking physique” biceps rippling under a black T-shirt. We’re in the lobby of Shoreditch House, Soho House’s east London hipster outpost, but even in such jaded surroundings it’s no exaggeration to say onlookers’ jaws drop.
Most startling, however, isn’t that Skarsgard is a dish — it’s that from the off he’s downright nice. Funny and friendly, he’s alone, with none of the entourage that such an A-lister normally commands. We have a rendezvous in the restaurant, but the reception claims it has no record of him staying and won’t let me in, meaning I’m left anxiously wondering how, without a contact phone number, I will find him. Happily, Skarsgard is stereotypically Scandi efficient and so, 61 seconds after our designated meeting time, he’s calling me and, another minute later, has arrived to collect me.
“This is like getting into Fort Knox,” he says apologetically as we enter the lift, adding, “I’ve never stayed here before, but I’m shooting a thing at the moment with Charli XCX on the east side of town in Dagenham [he pronounces it “Dag-en-ham”], so it made sense to stay east. But it’s a little hectic for my taste. We’re shooting early in the mornings and it’s lively at night, so you come back and it’s party time.”
Having failed to find a table in the bar, we end up ignored by waiting staff in a corner of the restaurant where Skarsgard, knees pointing sideways because they don’t fit under the table, gives the impression of having been away from home a bit too long and is happy to chat merrily all day about some acquaintances we have in common. He’s funny and self-deprecating, speaking with an American accent — he lived in the US for two decades — and his English perfect, although every now and then you hear the faintest Scandi underscore in a sibilant “s” and hefty vowels. In his slightly droopy almond eyes and pointy nose, you see traces of his father, the acclaimed Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard (known for Breaking the Waves, Good Will Hunting and The Hunt for Red October, among many others). When I later google young Stellan, I discover they’re doppelgängers. Do people ever tell him they loved him in Mamma Mia! (in which Stellan played one of Meryl Streep’s trio of exes)? “Ha! No, they don’t.”
Skarsgard is 48, a fact that surprises me since many of his greatest hit roles — the Israeli spy in the BBC’s The Little Drummer Girl, Nicole Kidman’s abusive husband in Big Little Lies — happened in the past decade. But then his career didn’t really get going until he was 32. The reason it took so long? His really, really, really ridiculous good looks.
‘There was nothing of substance’
He was 25 when he appeared in Zoolander, playing a model whose principal scene involves the following dialogue, “Models help people. They make them feel good about themselves. They also show them how to dress cool and wear their hair in interesting ways.” (He gamely recites this for me.) It was, and still is, very funny, but it didn’t put him top of casting directors’ lists for cerebral roles.
“There were definitely some rough years,” he agrees, despite knowing tiny violins everywhere will play at this story of being too handsome to work. “I was in my twenties, trying to get a job in LA, but I would never come across anything of substance. Any time I read something that was even remotely interesting, someone more established would come and take it. I was auditioning for jock number three in a bad TV series and not getting it. It wasn’t, ‘I’m too good for this ****,’ but it wasn’t a great feeling either.”
It took seven years before he was asked to audition for a meaty role: Generation Kill, David (The Wire) Simon’s drama about US Marines during the Iraq war, which — in keeping with its documentary feel — was casting unknowns. “Waiting to hear was horrible, horrible, horrible. Every time the phone rang, I would get heart palpitations — it was either get your dream job and fly to Namibia for seven months or go back to unemployment. But I got it and the next day I was on a plane with seven thick scripts, incredibly insecure and scared because it was too good to be true.”
Having smashed through the “hot” glass ceiling, Skarsgard was on his way, winning the role of hot but not dumb vampire Eric Northman, who admittedly didn’t wear many clothes, in HBO’s True Blood, which ran for six years. From there — via highbrow arthouse (What Maisie Knew and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia) and, er, more torso-baring fodder (The Legend of Tarzan and The Northman) — he recently reached the zenith of “household name with credibility” via his roles in the smash hits Big Little Lies and Succession.
Today we’re here to talk about his next move from brooding psycho into goofiness as the eponymous lead in Murderbot, a new Apple TV+ ten-parter. Based on the sci-fi novella series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells, the title suggests a Terminator-style dystopian fantasy. In fact, it turns out to be a sweet, slightly droll, gently funny yarn set in an unspecified future about an android (Skarsgard) who acts as a security guard for humans working on other planets. To his irritation he keeps being forced to interact with a bunch of “space hippies” — as Skarsgard puts it — whom he’s tasked to protect.
Did he deliberately choose the role (he also executive-produced the series) as a reaction to those recent bleak parts? “It wasn’t a conscious decision; I’ve never had a plan. Stuff just happens. But it’s very exciting to do something totally different from those dark, complicated, conflicted characters.” Before Murderbot he made Pillion, “a kinky gay biker” comedy, while his current top-secret project with Charli XCX is a “dark satire”. “To lean into comedy — that’s a real blast.”
‘My dad would walk around naked all the time’
The eldest of six children of My, a doctor, and Stellan (his four brothers — Bill, Gustaf, Valter and Sam — and sister, Eija, are also actors), Skarsgard grew up in Stockholm’s bohemian Sodermalm neighbourhood. “It was a very artistic household with lots of big dinner parties, lots of wine flowing. My dad was embarrassing because he wasn’t like my friends’ dads,” he recalls. “He’d walk around naked all the time, and there’d be weird poets and artists everywhere. Today it sounds super-inspiring and fun and creative, and when I look back it was incredible in many ways — we as kids were treated as equals. You’d be four and sitting with the adults and they’d be listening to you, saying, ‘All right, well, I don’t quite agree with that,’ which I’m grateful for. But when I became a teenager and friends came over, insecurities set in. My dream was for [my dad] to drive a Saab and wear a grey suit and leave at nine and come home at five, not running around with a bunch of hippies and being out all night.”
Still, the hippy friends cast him in the odd play or film. Aged 13, Skarsgard had his first taste of heart-throb-dom after he starred in the popular Swedish film The Dog That Smiled, which led to groupies hanging out around the house. “They came to say hi or to get an autograph, but it made me paranoid and very insecure. I didn’t like it at all.” Freaked out, he quit acting to hang out with his friends, listen to punk and support his local football team, Hammarby. When he was 19, he signed up for national service.
“Now it’s mandatory, but it wasn’t then and I didn’t do it for patriotic reasons to defend my country, to keep the Russians from invading Sweden, because that wasn’t even on the radar at the time. I did it because I was 19, I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I wanted to be James Bond for 18 months.”
Was it anything like being James Bond?
“Definitely less champagne and models,” he says with a chuckle. “It was quite bleak. But it was also a really good experience for me because I was a team leader, and when we were out on missions it was mostly me and three other guys, which was a lot of responsibility for an idiot teenager. So I had to grow up a bit.”
Would he like to be James Bond?
“I’m way too Swedish for that,” he shrugs.
But the franchise owners, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have just sold up to
Amazon. Everything’s up for grabs. How about a Scandi Bond spin-off?
Skarsgard’s taken by this. “Yeah. I could be a very polite, diplomatic Swedish James Bond, who negotiates.” Couldn’t he show off his gun-wielding military service skills? “Oh no, there’ll be no violence at all. It’ll just be boardroom meetings where people try to find consensus, everyone’s stressed out and desperately tries to avoid an argument or complications, that’s very Swedish. I’ll pitch it!”
After the military he went to Leeds Metropolitan University (now Leeds Beckett), ostensibly to study English, “but really just to have a blast”. There he acted in a couple of plays and decided to give acting another try. He went to theatre school in New York and from then on moved between there, Sweden and Los Angeles. In 2022 he was approached by the Succession writer Jesse Armstrong for what was initially intended as a cameo. Already a huge Armstrong fan because of Peep Show (“I love British comedy, love Fawlty Towers, Alan Partridge, love [Armstrong’s long-term collaborator] Armando Iannucci”), he said yes instantly. Armstrong told him about a scene he was writing where Matsson describes sending bricks of frozen blood to his assistant as a joke. “I was like, this is so delicious!”
The character was a blend of the Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek and Elon Musk. Three years on, Armstrong’s conception of a sinister, oddball billionaire rejoicing in chaotically pulling the world’s strings seems uncannily prescient. Skarsgard rolls his eyes, looking anguished.
“Yeah, with Lukas there’s no pushback. He’s surrounded by yay-sayers and you can feel his ego swelling, the megalomania.”
Does Skarsgard surround himself with yay-sayers, I ask, knowing the answer. “You mean, only yellow M&Ms in my trailer? No. I think I need to lean in and be a bit more diva-like.”
After all, he comes from a country where “jantelagen, as we call it — tall poppy syndrome — is a big thing. There are pros and cons to that. It’s quite an egalitarian system in mindset, but that’s not to say there isn’t huge inequality in Sweden between the rich and the poor, because there definitely is. In central Stockholm it’s all white, rich owners — you have to be a millionaire to live there — so everyone else is pushed out into the suburbs, it’s all rentals, and that’s created a lot of friction.”
An A-list love life
Nonetheless, Skarsgard is happy to be based in Stockholm again after nearly 20 years in the US. “To go home twice a year wasn’t enough. A couple of my brothers had kids and I wanted to see my nieces and nephews grow up, and I longed to be close to my childhood friends and walk around the streets where I grew up. And it feels pretty good to be in Sweden, considering the state of affairs in the US.”
Needless to say, over the years Skarsgard has been consistently linked to a number of high-profile names including Amanda Seyfried and (reportedly) Taylor Swift. He dated Kate Bosworth, his co-star in Straw Dogs, for two years, then Alexa Chung for another two. But today, despite having once announced he’d love to marry an Englishwoman, he’s with a compatriot, the actress Tuva Novotny, with whom he has a three-year-old child (Novotny also has two daughters from a previous relationship).
He used to say he’d like to “beat” his father’s total of eight children (after his parents divorced in 2007, Stellan remarried and had two more children). Does he still nurse that ambition? He laughs. “After one I’m like, I’m done. Maybe I’ll adopt eight adult kids just to beat my dad.”
How’s fatherhood? He looks very serious. “An adjustment for someone who’s a selfish ******* like myself. I’m so used to being able to go somewhere on a whim, take a job, like, ‘Oh, seven months in the Kalahari Desert? No problem.’ Now your priorities obviously change and you have to take other people’s needs into consideration. It takes a lot more planning to make it work, because I still love to work, but it’s about finding that balance. I have two teenage stepdaughters, so it’s not like they can come with me and be out of school for six months.”
Is he an embarrassing dad to them, like Stellan? “Oh yeah,” he grimaces. “I know how embarrassing they find it when I try to do, like, a TikTok dance.”
We say goodbye. It’s a glorious day and I ask if he plans to hang out at the rooftop swimming pool. “****! I’d forgotten there was a pool!” he exclaims. “I’ve been here three weeks and not gone there.” The vibe’s very sceney, I say, with everyone checking out everybody else’s bodies. “Oh. Well, maybe not then.” I’m sure nobody would have minded.
Murderbot is on Apple TV+ from May 16
Source:
https://www.thetimes.com/culture/tv...rd-interview-murderbot-swedish-bond-jlcrfjb37
