Alexander Skarsgård Is Loving His Freak Era And So Are We!

In Pillion, Harry Lighton’s dramedy about the relationship between a meek traffic warden and the biker who takes him on as his submissive, Alexander Skarsgård is impossibly handsome. That’s not just me saying that. It’s a line from the film, and it’s 100% true. As Ray, Skarsgård is a fantasy in leather who is all too aware of his sexiness, and how it allows him to ensnare an inexperienced Harry Melling while remaining an emotional brick wall. Ray is opaque to the point of obtuse, a man who has confused cruelty for stoicism. He maintains an impossible fantasy at the cost of true attachment or empathy. Is he an untapped well of feeling and backstory, or just a bit of a himbo without any of the warmth? Through Skarsgård’s performance, he’s both or neither. The mystery remains until the final seconds.

Of course Skarsgård is playing a ridiculously attractive man in biker gear who embodies any number of desires for the other characters and audience alike. For years, he has played many a glistening sex symbol figure, standing tall (like, so very tall) over his fellow leading men with ease. He’s the sort of handsome that feels like it must have been engineered in a lab, a too-good-to-be-true beauty that must be evened out by dickishness or a lack of talent. It would have been so easy for Skarsgård to slum it in hunk roles, headlining a succession of bland action roles where his abs do the talking. Instead, he’s done the best thing one could hope for with a gorgeous actor: become a total gremlin freak.

Well, I say ‘become’, but it’d be more accurate to say he’s been stealthily doing that for his entire career. What, you thought True Blood was a normal TV show? HBO’s oft-overlooked vampire drama was the epitome of well-polished trash, but beneath the blood and sex was a truly unhinged blend of confused allegory, Southern gothic, primetime soap, and spaghetti-at-the-wall desperation that made it watchable in spite of its speedy dip in quality. As Eric, the Viking vampire who coveted Sookie, Skarsgård is, of course, intensely alluring (shout out to whoever made the smart decision to get rid of that terrible Season 1 wig.) But he’s also committed to the madness. You can see how casting directors would look at Skarsgård as Eric and think, ‘Yes, there’s our next leading man’, but they were also sorely missing the point.

They did try to make his beefcake era happen. Remember when he played Tarzan in that supremely dull drama that tried to turn the public domain tale into yet another wannabe Marvel Cinematic Universe? It’s not that Skarsgård is bad in the title role, but it’s so evidently a waste of his blend of unnerving intensity and wacko flair that you wish they’d let him go off the vine more creatively. Fortunately, Skarsgård always seemed to have a better understanding of his abilities and ambitions than the seldom-daring industry he worked in.

Our greatest feral goblin actors with angelic faces know that subversion is the name of the game. Lure them in with the delts them get freaky. In The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Marielle Heller’s piercing and discomfiting portrait of adolescent lust, Skarsgård plays the boyfriend of our heroine’s mother, with whom she chooses to lose her virginity. With an added pornstache, Skarsgård excels at treading the line between hot and sleazy, playing a man who is all too eager to play with an adolescent’s emotions. War on Everyone cast him as a corrupt cop whose machismo is parodic to the point of ludicrous.

A big turning point came with Big Little Lies, the HBO series with an all-star cast that delved into the domestic peril of an upper-middle-class community and the oft-misunderstood women at its heart. Skarsgård played the abusive husband of Nicole Kidman, one half of the seemingly perfect couple who wielded his standing at the top of the society ladder like a knife. This one isn’t exactly freak mode stuff, but it does operate from that same agenda of taking culturally endorsed beauty and imbuing it with something askew that throws the audience’s expectations to the wayside. It was a horribly real performance, and deservedly won Skarsgård an Emmy.

But the best of the modern freak mode Skarsgård has to be our beloved Murderbot. Based on the novellas by Martha Wells, Apple TV+’s Murderbot is the perfect platform for some weirdo comedic Skarsgård. He plays an android who has gained sentience and become a sullen loner who just wants to binge-watch soap operas but is continually waylaid by human jackassery. In the books, Murderbot is always masked, but making it into a being with a conventionally hot face ended up being a brilliant move. It allows Skarsgård to convey a lot of disdain with a mere brow furrow, but it also adds a fun wrinkle to Murderbot’s problems: how do you act when all these damn humans think you’re hot and that makes you want to fall into a cavern?

In fairness, I also think Skarsgård was born into freak mode. He is, after all, Stellan’s son, and I’m reasonably sure that man didn’t wear clothes on-screen for a couple of decades (he certainly preferred nude mode at home, as Alexander has explained on several occasions.) Papa Skarsgård’s career has long been defined by off-kilter performances and a unique sexual energy that can be alluring or unnerving, and often both at the same time. As one of Lars von Trier’s most frequent collaborators, he specialized in playing figures of unease whose loyalties often couldn’t be judged until it was too late. Even in mainstream Hollywood blockbusters, there’s something very un-Hollywood about him. He shouldn’t be the hottest of Meryl’s potential baby-daddies in Mamma Mia!, but it’s not even close. Father and son have worked together, appearing in von Trier’s Melancholia and as two generations of bathroom-based Swedish lawyers in Kingdom, but we’re still hoping for that ‘Oops, All Skarsgårds’ epic.

And it’s all remaining freaky off-screen, as Skarsgård goes all out with the promotional circuit. He’s game for anything and he’s happy to do it in a succession of eye-catching outfits. His Pillion press tour wardrobe has been a giddy mixture of leather daddy and couture camp, all worn with a genuine sense of joy. Why be stoic when you can be weird? It’s what Stellan would want.

And what’s next for him? Well, how about a romantic fantasy where a woman commissions a basket weaver to make her a husband out of wicker? Spoiler alert: Skarsgård is not playing the weaver. Long may the freak reign continue. Thanks, Sweden!