A new interview with Alex appears in DN.se. Huge thanks to Alexander Skarsgard Library for the translation and links. An excerpt of the interview is below. For the full interview please click here:
Alexander Skarsgård: “Spying Is the Ultimate Form of Acting”
by Nicholas Wennö
London. After being acclaimed for his dark role in “Big Little lies”, Alexander Skarsgård is back in the spy thriller “The Little Drummer Girl” and the drama comedy “The Hummingbird Project”. DN’s Nicholas Wennö met the Hollywood star to talk about spying, acting, bald heads and being served coffee by John le Carré.
There are no shortcuts to the perfect bald head. If anyone knows, it’s Alexander Johan Hjalmar Skarsgård. In the upcoming drama comedy “The Hummingbird Project” with Jesse Eisenberg, the Swede plays an eccentric math genius who dreams of becoming very rich by laying a fiber-optic cable from a server in Kansas to the New York Stock Exchange. For this torturous transformation, “the Swedish sex bomb” removed hair after hair for a seamless transition between his side hair and his bald head.
“This is exactly how dedicated this guy is,” said the film’s Canadian director Kim Nguyen enthusiastically in connection with a late night show at the London Film Festival.
The following day, Alexander Skarsgård is sitting in a boutique hotel in central London and he flashes the classic family grin.
“Oh, no big deal, but when I see the character in front of me, I really want to create the look. Sometimes a small detail can get everything to come off with a character. But it still ended up with us having to make a digital edit so the transition between my hair and the bare head would look credible. Kim liked the look, but we had to persuade the financiers who wanted me to be, eh … more recognizable,” says the world’s perhaps best-known Bajen fan while sitting on a couch.
For the role of the enigmatic Israeli agent Becker in “The Little Drummer Girl” he only needed to dye his beard a bit darker. Just like millions of other John le Carré fans, he was fascinated by the moral gray scales in a treacherous world where everyone plays “the theater of the real” as one of the characters says in the series.
“Spying is the ultimate form of acting – it’s literally life and death. Unlike in a Hollywood movie, one might be killed for real if you are bad,” says Skarsgård with a dazzling smile.
John Le Carrés acclaimed original novel was published in 1983 but set four years earlier. The initial action is triggered by the event of a bomb attack against a Jewish family in Bonn’s navy diplomatic district. Israeli spy master Martin Kurtz (Michael Shannon) is flown in to investigate the terrorist attack that bears the same signature as other attacks against prominent Jews. Just like Skarsgård’s agent Becker, Kurtz has begun to doubt that the end always justifies the means – “we are surgeons not butchers.”
Sources: Nicholas Wennö for DN.se (x, x), Translation: Google & Babylon + Cleanup & Interpretation by The Library + Special Thanks to A_Sussan for translating two super choppy sentences! Photos: Little Drummer Girl portrait via Radio Times (x), DN.se scans via Svenska_Ettor twitter (x, x)
