And we finally get an interview:
Big Little Lies: Alexander Skarsgård on His Psycho-Sexual Pas De Deux with Nicole Kidman
Skarsgård spoke to VF.com ahead of HBO’s
Big Little Lies finale this Sunday.
by
JULIE MILLER
MARCH 31, 2017 9:00 AM
Alexander Skarsgård and Nicole Kidman had never worked together before they united to play husband and wife on HBO’s
Big Little Lies—a high-wire act in which the actors summon a textured, toxic marriage, replete with graphic violence, passionate sex, and a disturbing combination of both. (What Skarsgård and Kidman accomplish is all the more impressive considering they make up just one story line in an ensemble series limited to seven episodes.) The two actors did, however, have one mutual experience that uniquely prepared them for the task at hand.
“Nicole and I have both worked with Lars von Trier,” Skarsgård said by phone on Wednesday, referring to the controversial Danish filmmaker who doesn’t shy away from the disturbing—be it sexual, psychological, or experimental. Kidman starred in 2003’s
Dogville and Skarsgård in 2011’s
Melancholia. As the actor pointed out, Jean-Marc Vallée—the French-Canadian filmmaker who directed
Big Little Lies—“works in a similar way—with existing lights and a hand-held camera that is constantly on the move. It’s not a traditional filming experience in that there is a master shot. You don’t block scenes. It is very liberating as an actor. Every take is different, and you can try new things without being restricted to tape marks on the floor. It helped us, especially for those very emotional and physical scenes.”
Kidman, who also executive-produced the series, has said that she was adamant about casting Skarsgård. “I wanted him! I wanted him badly,” the Oscar winner told
Vulture last week about the Swedish actor, whose breakout role was as a vampire in HBO’s
True Blood before he achieved title billing this past summer in the $180 million
Legend of Tarzan. According to Skarsgård, he and Kidman were on the same page from day one, when they took what author Liane Moriarty had written in her best-selling novel and what screenwriter-producer David E. Kelley put in the script, then hashed out a plan for a psycho-sexual pas de deux that television audiences had never seen before.
“I wasn’t familiar with the book when I got the script, but I was really intrigued by this relationship,” explained Skarsgård. “I felt that it was an opportunity to tell a story about an abusive husband that wasn’t a stereotypical two-dimensional character—it was a chance to find someone who is genuinely, deeply struggling with his demons. We had a couple weeks before we started shooting, and I spent time with Nicole working on our relationship—discussing where we wanted it to go and how to portray the marriage, in terms of making it more interesting and more confusing in a way that was fascinating for the audience.
“We wanted to show how sexual their relationship is, and how that bleeds into the abusiveness, and how the interconnectedness of those two things make her blame herself for him being so abusive. That’s one of the reasons it takes her longer to realize she can’t be with him. At the beginning of the series, she still sees that innocence in him.”
For those intense scenes—whether they were sexual or abusive—Skarsgård explained, “It was all about building that trust, finding your connection, jumping off the ledge, and seeing where it takes you.”
Kidman
has said that the physical scenes were, in fact, so physical that she left set with bruises. Her decision to go Method was partly because of Vallée’s documentary style of filming, and partly because she “wanted to tap into the truth of” what women actually go through in these relationships. As Celeste and Perry, both Kidman and Skarsgård would tap into such places of passion, darkness, and intensity for those scenes that Skarsgård admitted “it was definitely tough shaking that off.”
“It was very important to reconnect after shooting those scenes,” he continued. “We made a point of checking in with each other, giving each other a hug. Nicole is an incredible partner because she is so generous and so open and it makes it easier as an actor when you have a partner like that.”
Skarsgård chose to live in that kind of murky mind space once before—in 2002, while starring in a Swedish production of
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf that ran for six months and required him to go onstage and dive headfirst into the darkness for more than 150 performances.
“It was something I had to kind of work on—shaking it off—just in order to function,” said Skarsgård. “I learned the hard way. Every night was a performance, and it felt almost impossible to just go home. But you can’t let it consume you.”
Ugly and complicated as Celeste and Perry’s marriage is on the inside, the outside is a thing of splendor—they appear to be a picture-perfect couple living with their gorgeous blond twins in a modern mansion situated on the breathtaking Monterey, California, coast. And Skarsgård said he enjoyed dismantling the audience’s idyllic first impression.
“We play the dream family with these beautiful kids, this amazing house, and great sex life,” said Skarsgård. “I love storytelling like this, though, where you almost trick the audience. In general, we are lazy as consumers and just want to label people as good guy, bad guy. But it is fun when you have a project like this and can surprise people.”
http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/03/big-little-lies-hbo-alexander-skarsgard-nicole-kidman
