Oscar Frontrunner Stellan Skarsgård Looks Back at His Best Roles, from ‘Breaking the Waves’ to ‘Dune’

As awards season continues, Stellan Skarsgård made the schlep up to the Santa Barbara International Film Festival to accept the Montecito Award from his “Dune” costar Josh Brolin. But first, he submitted to an hour of film clips and my questions about his entire career. Well, that would be impossible, having starred in more than 120 films since his 1972 film debut. His first English-language movie was American Playhouse’s “Noon Wine” in 1985.

Lauded at home in Sweden from a young age and logging countless roles in Norway and Denmark and Hollywood as well, this year he won the European Film Award and the Golden Globe. He’s also nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the BAFTAs and the Oscars for his role as a veteran filmmaker trying to make a comeback in Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s family drama “Sentimental Value,” which is up for nine Oscars, including Best Picture.

Skarsgård also won the Golden Globe and the Critics Choice Award for his supporting role as Boris Shcherbina, a Council of Ministers’ deputy chairman, in HBO’s 2019 limited series “Chernobyl.”

This versatile actor can do anything: hero, villain, rascal, executive, husband, lover, father. He moves freely from independent Scandinavian dramas to big-scale Hollywood franchises, starring as William “Bootstrap Bill” Turner in two “Pirates of the Caribbean” installments, astrophysicist Dr. Erik Selvig in four Marvel “Thor” movies, as well as the bloated Baron Harkonnen in the first two Denis Villeneuve “Dune” films.

‘Sentimental Value’Courtesy Everett Collection

But in “Sentimental Value,” he feels unleashed, deploying his craft and guile to paint layers of this often selfish and needy father who is trying to stay vital and reconnect with his two daughters, the also-nominated Renate Reinsve and Inga Ibsdotter Illeaas.

We covered a lot of ground in our interview. Here are some highlights.

Born in Gothenburg, Sweden, Skarsgård moved a lot during his childhood as his father, who married his mother young, sought better employment. He worked in amateur theater and landed a role in a TV series that made him a teen star. He dropped out of school at 17 and went independent, working in theater (the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm) and television.

He first worked with Danish director Lars von Trier with his breakout role in Cannes prize-winner “Breaking the Waves” (1996) and did four more movies with the director, including “Dancer in the Dark” (2000), “Dogville” (2003), “Melancholia” (2011), and “Nymphomaniac, Vol. 1” (2013). The last two films are the second and third installments in the filmmaker’s Depression Trilogy, which begins in 2009 with “Antichrist” and is followed by “Nymphomaniac.”

On the set of “Breaking the Waves,” von Trier posted signs reading “make mistakes.” “That’s wonderful,” said Skarsgård, “because, OK, I can do that at least. But then afterwards, he shot himself with a handheld camera. You could do each take different if you wanted to, because he was sampling, and he knew when he had enough, and then that way he got a lot of life in his films.”

‘Breaking the Waves’

When von Trier called Skarsgård to offer him a part in his next film, he said, “I’d like you to play the male lead in it. But you will not get to fuck. But you will show your dick at the last minute of the film, and it will be very floppy.”

Sadly, von Trier has battled depression all his life. Skarsgård praised Kirsten Dunst’s performance as a depressive in “Melancholia.” Alas, von Trier is now battling Parkinson’s.

In Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, everyone understands each other’s language: Skarsgård is always performing in Swedish. “I made eight films, I think, in Norway,” he said. “They think I’m Norwegian now, but with a speech impediment.”

“Breaking the Waves” opened up the door to more Hollywood roles. He was amazed that they flew him first class from Stockholm to play a submarine captain over two days in John McTiernan’s “The Hunt for Red October.”

He had a much richer role in Gus Van Sant’s “Good Will Hunting” opposite Robin Williams and Matt Damon, who wrote the Oscar-winning script with Ben Affleck. Williams did each take differently, Skarsgård said, which kept him on his toes. And Van Sant rarely said a word.

As for his ability to look natural in front of the camera, Skarsgård learned that “you do not want to see the tools,” he said. On “Sentimental Value,” he said, “we are very different. We have a very different background, me and my daughters. I’m the most experienced. And then my oldest daughter [in the film, Reinsve], she’s rather experienced and has had a breakthrough in the film, ‘The Worst Person in the World.’ The younger daughter [Illeaas] has almost no film experience at all. She’s done theater a little. But we play in the same room, in the same tone, in the same key, all of us. How is that possible? Because we take away the tools, we take away our skills and tried to be as authentic and raw as possible.”

Clearly, the actor is able to fit into whatever universe he is called to play in. He chose to go with prosthetic barnacles on Gore Verbinski’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest,” a decision he regretted as Bill Nighy and others had to wear gray pajamas for CGI. He watched the Marvel universe change over four “Thor” movies as astrophysicist Dr. Erik Selvig. “It became more and more corporate,” he said. “They knew how to handle the Marvel Universe, and they had a special idea about how it should be done. But they took more and more power away from the director, and it became more sterile.”

As for Phyllida Lloyd’s “Mamma Mia!” and its sequel, he still does not understand why someone who cannot sing or dance was cast in a musical. “They can pitch you afterwards, which is great,” he said.

In the English-language version of “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Skarsgård was cast by David Fincher to play the charismatic but venal Martin Vanger, the CEO of Vanger Industries. Skarsgård doesn’t mind doing multiple takes. “You can try different angles going into the scene in different ways, and you just go and go and go,” he said. “You can’t be tense for 20 takes, you can’t pretend, you can’t be ambitious. For 20 takes, you start to crack a bit, and you do 10 takes that are maybe terrible, and you fall apart, and you lose your lines, and then you come back, and you find something new in the lines. So actually, it works.”

Playing a villain is no problem for him: “It’s cool to play that you don’t feel anything about anything,” he said. “You take your motor chainsaw and cut somebody up, and you feel nothing, that is fantastic.”

‘Chernobyl’Liam Daniel/HBO

Skarsgård did stellar work in two acclaimed, beautifully crafted miniseries: Craig Mazin’s “Chernobyl” and Tony Gilroy‘s “Andor,” which is part of the Star Wars universe. “Chernobyl” is a chilling nail-biter and a dead-on accurate depiction of what happened after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The series reveals how the Russian government evaded facts and truth.

“It’s something interesting with us humans,” said Skarsgård. “We are adaptable to authoritarian regimes, and we compromise quickly with everything. Even facts don’t matter anymore, just because we think that the power wants us to think a certain way. It was obvious for the Nazis. It was obvious for the Soviet Union. ‘Chernobyl’ is about a system that is so corrupt that people are so afraid of being caught with doing a mistake that they start to falsify everything: even the nuclear power safety rules.”

And my favorite Skarsgård role stretches over two 12-episode seasons of “Andor.” He took full advantage of the time as the magnetic, untrustworthy yet heroic undercover political activist Luthen Rael, who is working to overthrow a corrupt government. “He is, of course, secretive,” said Skarsgård, “and he’s supposed to be a mystery, but he reveals himself part by part.”

Clearly, he enjoyed playing the ruthless, evil villain Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in “Dune: Part One” and “Part Two.” And he was just as happy to leave the makeup behind. He was willing to sacrifice his comfort to make Harkonnen naked and scary. He submitted to eight hours of makeup every time he appeared on screen, and 88 pounds of fat suit.

“It’s interesting to do a character where you don’t have to do psychology, ” said Skarsgård. “You don’t have to explain him. You don’t have say, ‘Well, he was raped when he was a kid, or his father beat him,’ or whatever. But you have to do another thing that is difficult. You have to make him so that people wake up in the middle of the night and see him in front of their eyes. You make his presence frightening, his body. In the beginning, they had the idea of dressing him in armor like a Marvel guy, and I said, ‘he’s not dangerous that way. He’s more dangerous naked… and people will remember that vision of him.'”

Stellan Skarsgård in ‘Dune’Chia Bella James

But between the “Dune” films, the actor suffered a stroke that impaired his memory. He called Villeneuve and Gilroy and explained the situation. They both urged him to come to the set and told him they would make it work. Now he has his lines fed into an earpiece, and has to time his words while listening to his co-stars at the same time.

Joachim Trier told me he went to Stockholm to woo Skarsgård into playing the filmmaker role he wrote for him in “Sentimental Value.” That’s not how the actor remembers it. “We were like two dogs sniffing each other in the butt,” the actor said. “But we were wagging the tails, at the same time. But of course I wanted to work with him.”

His performance as Gustav Borg in “Sentimental Value” is often about his eyes, his face, the way he reacts to things without words. There’s one moment with Elle Fanning where the director listens to her insecurities and reassures her, while knowing she’s wrong for the part and that his daughter — Renate Reinsve — is right for it. It’s amazing that he gave this performance with an earpiece feeding him his lines.

Borg is trying to reconnect with his daughter. “It has nothing to do with the film,” said Skarsgård. “He thinks that the film is just a film that he’s going to make, but the film is also about the family and the relationships. But he doesn’t know that it’s why he’s doing it. But he tries to reach out and tries to be emotionally adult and capable with his daughters. And he’s not. He’s clumsy. He says the wrong things. He does the wrong things, but at the same time, as a director with Elle Fanning, he’s like your ideal father. He’s sensitive. Hhe understands psychology. Many directors and artists I know are like that. They’re so obsessed by their art, and their art is also a refuge, because they can control it, in a way. It’s more difficult to control the emotional life of a family, and that’s what scares them.”

Skarsgård and his oldest son Alexander (“Pillion“) have been having fun on the award circuit. A little too much fun: Skarsgård thinks he broke a rib at the SNL after-party.