By When Alexander Skarsgård was 20-years-old, he left his native Sweden and moved to Leeds, in the north of England. "It was important to avoid London because I was travelling with a friend and we wanted to get the quintessential English experience," he revealed, during his on-stage talk last weekend at the Esquire Townhouse in St James', London.
If there was any doubt in the room as to how suited the Swedish heartthrob was to living in the student area of the city, it evaporated when they heard the joy with which he talked about Leeds' most notorious pub crawl. "There's this famous thing called the Otley Run," he said, his voice warm with nostalgia. "I loved it."
Alexander Johan Hjalmar Skarsgård grew up in Vällingby, Stockholm, the eldest son of actor Stellan Skarsgård, and spent his early years fantasising that his bohemian father was a regular dad who drove a Saab and worked a desk job.
At 13, his father's friend cast him in the TV series Hunden som log (The Dog That Smiled), a fairly small Swedish production, but one that everyone he knew watched because of the few TV channels available. Skarsgård became uncomfortable with the level of fame it afforded him and decided to quit acting.
His father never pushed him to keep going or to capitalise on being recognised, something he is still grateful for. "He just said it was up to me, and that if I wasn't loving it to do something else," he says. "I would have listened if he'd said to stay in it, but that could have turned me off acting."
Earlier that day, we meet at a private member's club in London, where he arrives dressed in a cosy, walnut-coloured roll-neck, selvedge jeans and Clarks desert boots. The 43-year-old now lives in the East Village, New York, but flew here from Vancouver where he is currently filming The Stand, a TV adaptation of Stephen King's novel.
It took seven years, a stint in the Swedish military and another stint mastering the aforementioned Otley Run before Skarsgård returned to acting. His first big break came in 2008 when he played a 1000-year-old vampire in HBO's True Blood, a show adapted from The Southern Vampire Mysteries novel series by Charlaine Harris. It was the height of vampire fever – the same year the film adaptation of Twilight was released – and Skarsgård's portrayal of pallid, aquamarine-eyed Eric Northman spurned him legions of fans. Searching 'Eric Northman fan-fiction' on Google brings up 81,500 results.
It was also the start of a fruitful partnership with between Skarsgård and HBO, a collaboration which hit a home-run when he was cast in Big Little Lies in 2017. The series is based on Liane Moriarty's novel of the same name and stars Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, and Zoë Kravitz as three women living in Monterey, California.
Skarsgård plays Perry, the emotionally and physically abusive husband of Kidman's character Celeste. To the outside world a handsome, sharply-dressed, romantic husband, but behind doors a monster who skulks around their house after her.
The show was widely praised for its nuanced and compassionate portrayal of domestic abuse, with Skarsgård's performance going on to win an Emmy and Golden Globe amongst other plaudits for the series.
"The character had so much depth and inner turmoil that I never hesitated because it was dark," he says. "I find it less interesting when an abusive husband is turned into a caricature: someone in a wife-beater with a beer on the couch screaming at his wife. It makes for more interesting story-telling if there are moments where you can see the person she fell in love with."
He stayed with friends in Los Angeles while filming Big Little Lies, grateful to come back to a family's home for dinner after shooting something so dark instead of returning to a lonely hotel room. After a run of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at a theatre in Sweden early on in his career, he learned how to leave dark characters behind at the end of the day or else it "would just suffocate you", saying that as a result he finds playing dark characters "quite cathartic".
There is a kind of Nordic gloom to some of his characters, something that might be responsible for his being cast as Stephen King's demonic villain Randall Flagg in The Stand, due to be released next year. Skarsgård says he grew up afraid of St. Bernard dogs after reading Cujo and still remembers going to see The Shining.
King's writing is enjoying a rich second life in film and television at the moment, with books such as The Dark Tower and Pet Sematary released recently, and The Shining sequel Doctor Sleep soon to follow. There's also It, the Warner Brother's reboot which features Skarsgård's younger brother, Bill, as Pennywise the clown. Are they competing for who can terrify children more? "Randall Flagg is a very different character," he says diplomatically. "He's such a delicious villain [and] it’s fun to play someone who has that exuberance."
He is also strongly rumoured to be appearing in The Northman, teaming up again with Big Little Lies co-star Nicole Kidman. He's coy about the project when I ask, though says of Kidman that he, "can’t think of another actress I’d rather work with", and later on stage speaks highly of The Northman director Robert Eggers' most recent film, the trippy The Lighthouse.
Whether or not it will return for a third season, Big Little Lies seems to have drawn a line under Skarsgård's character, though the actor does have an idea for getting more time on set with Meryl Streep, who played Perry's mother Mary Louise in season two."I think they should do season three and it’s all about Perry and his mother. Dad worked with Meryl on Mamma Mia 1 and 2 and had an amazing time," he says, adding that he would ,"one hundred per cent" do Mamma Mia 3 for some more time on-set with Meryl.
Which leaves one more important matter to discuss: whether he's familiar with the 'skarsbrow', the internet's fixation with him raising his eyebrow into a perfect arch. "No, no. This?" he says, before cocking it and smiling. "I've never heard of that."
Alexander Skarsgård is an ambassador for Clarks
