Category Archives: Interview

New Alexander Skarsgard Interview

Leave a reply

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)

Alexander Skarsgard Live Interview with LA Times

2 Replies

Alexander Skarsgard was interviewed by LA Times during a live Facebook session. Fans were able to ask questions during this live interview discussing his role in “Big Little Lies”. This interview was part of their sessions with “Emmy contenders”. Keeping fingers crossed that yes Alex is recognized with a nomination for his work in Big Little Lies. It was definitely a role that pushed boundaries.

You can watch the full interview on this link here:

 

 

Video Interview & Gent Film Festival Footage

Leave a reply

15

Here’s another great video interview (13 minutes) which includes footage of Alexander with fans at Gent Film Festival. Unfortunately I can’t embed it right now, but just click on the link to watch:

http://deredactie.be/

A big thank you to the media and all Alexander’s fans in Belgium for making this trip a big success! Alexander mentions how surprised he was at how many people turned out to see him.

 

Alexander Skarsgard Video Interview with Vertigo

Leave a reply

14

Here’s a another great video interview from Gent Film Festival. This one with Vertigo is a tasty 15 minutes long. At the very end Alexander shares his favorite memory from a range of his movies, and talks about looking forward to Tarzan.

Alexander Featured In NW Magazine

Leave a reply

longform-original-26214-1438960815-3

The latest issue of Australia’s NW Magazine has an article on Alexander, which includes an interview. I’m always a little dubious about interviews where Alexander answers a question about his private life – knowing how interviewers are usually directed by his management not to ask him about it – but hey, maybe they caught him on a very “chilled” day, and it’s a nice article to help promote “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” in Australia. Thank you to fabulouslyfreespirited for sharing the article.

tumblr_nvbpavas8a1ql39g0o1_540

Continue reading →

Alexander is Harpers Bazaar #MCM

Leave a reply

landscape-1442243290-hbz-mcm-alexander-skarsgarrd

From Harpers Bazaar on Monday September 14th.

Though he’s quite good at it, Alexander Skarsgard is a last-resort actor. “I was trying to figure out what to do and was worthless at everything, so I was like,'” he breathes out, defeated, playing his capitulating twenty-something self. “‘All right…'” Skarsgard is sitting cross-legged, wearing funky socks and no shoes, in an armchair in New York’s Crosby Street Hotel. It takes a certain kind of jeu d’esprit, and physical agility, at 6’4″ to sit cross-legged in an armchair, but the Swedish actor is delightfully goofier than you might expect of Eric Northman, the 1000-year-old Viking vampire that catapulted Skarsgard to instant superstardom as the lead in the cult hit True Blood in 2008. Before that, he had been jobbing around in roles like Zoolandar’sMeekus (you remember him: Ben Stiller’s model roommate who dies in a freak gasoline fight accident), arguably his big rentrée into the performance world after quitting his child acting career, and a central role on the more upmarket HBO miniseries Generation Kill.

Continue reading →

Alexander on his morally complex role in “Diary”

1 Reply

1

news.com.au have released an interview with Alexander in which he talks about his morally complex role in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and his first crush at the age of  8 or 9.

He admits it’s confronting, but Alexander Skarsgard doesn’t want you to see his latest character — a man who has an affair with a 15-year-old — as a bad guy.

The Swedish actor who made his name in the vampire series True Blood, will next be seen in The Diary of a Teenage Girl, where he plays a 35-year-old who has a relationship with his girlfriend’s daughter.

While it’s a controversial topic, Skarsgard told news.com.au he hopes the audience feel empathy for his character.

“Without condoning what he does, I thought it would be an interesting challenge to play. The audience is supposed to feel uncomfortable with it. If you just felt that he’s preying on her, it wouldn’t be interesting for more than one or two scenes. If you think he’s a villain, it’s too easy.

“It’s more interesting if you think he’s a good guy but then you think, ‘Oh, but sh*t; now he does this. I don’t know how I feel about him anymore’.”

Continue reading →

Alexander Interview With The Herald (Scotland)

Leave a reply

023832

Here’s an in-depth interview Alexander gave to The Herald Scotland during the Edinburgh Film Festival. He talks about growing up in Stockholm and his military service. There’s also some more mentions of “Tarzan” (only 11 months to go now) which only gets us really, really excited as we still await our first glimpse of the Jungle King.

When he was 19 Alexander Skarsgard signed up for national service. He didn’t do it for a laugh. He didn’t do it because he’d always wanted to join the army. He didn’t do it because he wanted to fire a gun. He didn’t even do it because he wanted to react against his lefty bohemian upbringing as embodied in his actor dad Stellan Skarsgard.

He is clear on this when I suggest it might have been. “I don’t know about rebellion,” he tells me as we talk almost 20 years later. “I come from a family of anarchists and socialists and pacifists and I was never into guns myself. I wouldn’t say I did it to p*** off dad or anything.”

No, he says, it was something else. “I grew up in south Stockholm in a very urban environment and I wanted that challenge of doing something that was extreme. It’s physically and mentally quite challenging and I was really intrigued by that.”

Continue reading →

Alexander Interview With Vulture

Leave a reply

12

And it’s certainly interview day today (make the most of it, he’s gone home to Sweden for a well earned break now so things may get quiet for a while). Here’s Alexander’s interview with Vulture

Yes, Alexander Skarsgard showed up to this week’s premiere of The Diary of a Teenage Girl looking fierce as hell in drag, but don’t let his glittery gold gown and Farrah Fawcett–inspired wig distract you from the career-high work he’s done here by playing it straight. In Teenage Girl, he’s cast as mustachioed Monroe, who complicates his open relationship with the perpetually substance-addled Charlotte (Kristen Wiig) by secretly hooking up with her 15-year-old daughter Minnie (British newcomer Bel Powley). That’s an awfully provocative love triangle — only somewhat excused by the fact that the movie takes place in the anything-goes climate of 1976 San Francisco — but in the hands of writer-director Marielle Heller, who adapted the project from Phoebe Gloeckner’s novel, these talents have turned in a terrifically sensitive, startlingly honest coming-of-age story. Last week in Los Angeles, Vulture sat down with Skarsgard to talk about he approached his R-rated role, and how his own teenage experiences factored into things.

Continue reading →

Alexander Interview With HitFix

Leave a reply

13

There is a nice HitFix interview with Alexander with mentions of “War On Everyone” and “Tarzan” as well as “The Diary of a Teenage Girl”.

I was lucky enough to see TDOATG at Sundance and it sort of stuck with me ever since which I guess is now almost seven months later.  How you got involved and what convinced you to take the part?

Well, I got involved not in the traditional way through my agent, it was actually my friend Jack McBrayer, a comedian that was on “30 Rock,” I don’t know if you know who that is…

Absolutely.

So, he’s a dear friend of mine and when I was back in L.A. we were neighbors.  He basically said, ‘My friend Marielle wrote this script, it’s her first feature and I think she’s really cool and really smart.  She wants you to read it.  Can I give it to you?’  And I said, ‘Sure.’  And I read it and I just fell in love with the script.  I thought it was such a unique story and I loved the character.  I saw it as a real interesting challenge to try to figure out how to play Monroe in a way that wasn’t too predatory — just kind of make him real and find some life in that.  And then I met Marielle and I was kind of blown away by her energy and her enthusiasm.  I mean this project has been her baby for almost a decade.  She adapted the comic book for the stage first and did a play off Broadway in New York where she played me Minnie herself and wrote the script.  It was a combination of that kind of just like being really just fallen in love with Marielle and her energy and feeling like this could be an interesting challenge to find a way of making Monroe layered and real.

Continue reading →