I like a streamlined day, to be like water going through. And not entirely unhealthy, I think, when you're used to working on far-flung sets.” He says he doesn't want to waste time deciding, this or that, right or left? “I like it frictionless. That Groundhog Day feeling is comforting to me, I guess. “I rarely venture outside my little neighborhoods in Stockholm or New York.
Left to his own devices, without a movie or TV shoot to occupy him, Skarsgård says he likes to keep his days low on surprise. Though there have been a string of girlfriends, he isn't married. I like life in a specific way.” He doesn't have kids. Psychologically too.” How so, psychologically? “I'm stubborn,” says Skarsgård. He says that while his 70-year-old father, the celebrated Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, “is still an energetic motherfucker,” he feels increasingly stiff in his 40s. In an American-accented English that's flavored with a lot of f-bombs, Skarsgård's conversation tends towards intelligent, slightly melancholy introspection. His small, neat teeth are quick to flash in smiles of agreement or pleasure at a joke. He's dressed all in black today, from his Converse to a casual sweater to the shades he has hooked over his collar. “But the experience still reverberates inside of me.” “We wrapped almost a year ago,'' he says.
Hardly rising to scan the menu, Skarsgård arranges himself Caesar-style: in full Roman recline. “And they cranked it up to eleven,” Skarsgård remembers, “every single fucking day.” No wonder, when he comes into a restaurant near Regent's Park in London, the actor flops down almost horizontally on a cushioned sofa seat. Making The Northman, the weather gods had the dial.
That shoot took place on a soundstage equipped with temperature and humidity controls.
In the mid-2010s he had played another topless hero in a revival of Tarzan for Warner Bros. The Northman's director Robert Eggers favors long, single-camera action shots - and Skarsgård, often near nude in the chill, caked in artificial blood and real filth, forever trying to remember which stuntman to pretend to murder next, was pushed to the limits of his endurance. He had to maintain the extra weight and shape through months of pandemic delays, before a shoot that mostly took place on an open mountain-top in Ireland. Over many trips to the gym in New York and in Stockholm (the two cities between which Skarsgård splits his time) he thickened his 6’ 3” physique to portray a hulking viking warrior. The Stockholm-born actor, who is 46, has spent as many years as he cares to remember helping to realize an ambitious blockbuster about vikings called The Northman, which finally arrives in movie theaters this week. If Alexander Skarsgård were to write the book of his 40s so far, he says, he would give it the title Stale Mud and Dry Tears. GQ Hype: It's the big story of right now.