The Guardian interview
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Alexander Skarsgård
broughps — 9 years ago(October 01, 2016 11:13 AM)
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/oct/01/alexander-skarsgard-war-on-everyone?CMP=fb_gu
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River_7 — 9 years ago(October 08, 2016 11:09 PM)
Afew years ago, Alexander Skarsg5b4rd turned up at a Hammarby football match in Stockholm noticeably whats a polite way of putting this? Worse for wear? I was sh!tfaced says Skarsgrd. I went up in front of the crowd and started doing this chant. Someone put it on YouTube. Im very drunk, going: f&cking c^nts listen to me! I thought: This is real embarrassing.
During the bleak hangover that followed, the 40-year-old Swedish actor thought he might have torpedoed a career that had just seen him get the part of Tarzan in this summers blockbuster. In fact it made him an even more perfect fit for the role. Warner Bros had said they needed someone primal and animalistic, he says. So my agent sent them the video, saying: Isnt this beep primal enough for you?
Another one of the half-million people who watched it was John Michael McDonagh, writer-director of The Guard and Calvary, who was on the lookout for a hard-drinking detective for his pitch-black buddy comedy War On Everyone. He saw the video and went: Thats the guy, says Skarsgrd. It got me the job. The moral of the story is: Make a fool of yourself and people will love you. Remember that, kids.
When we meet around midday in the lobby of the Hotel Normandy during the Deauville American film festival, it seems hes taken his own lesson to heart. The previous night he was so smashed that he invaded the DJ booth at War111c On Everyones afterparty and proved that while you can take the man out of Sweden I played strictly Abba, he says. When in doubt, Lay All Your Love On Me. We closed that place down.
As he concertinas himself into the back of a people carrier for the two-hour drive to Charles de Gaulle airport, sheltering his eyes behind dark shades, its somehow reassuring to know that savage hangovers afflict even movie stars whove been blessed with the sort of face that led Ben Stiller to cast him in Zoolander so he could ask him: Did you ever think theres more to life than being really, really, really ridiculously good-looking?
Skarsgrd has been figuring out an answer to that ever since. He starred as a brooding, topless vampire in HBOs True Blood, which ran for seven years until 2014, and made him a pin-up and earned him a legion of fans whod approach wanting nothing more than to get bitten. (He never did. You bite one fan) Simultaneously, the shows success gave him the opportunity to play odd parts in indie films that didnt trade on his looks. In coming-of-age-in-the-70s film The Diary Of A Teenage Girl, he was the mustachioed creep who slept with his girlfriends daughter; in Melancholias dreamlike apocalypse he was an earnest, cuckolded newlywed; and in next years Duncan Jones-directed Mute hell play a silent Amish character. Its not about wanting to show Im versatile, he explains. Its just feeling that excitement of not knowing who a character is but figuring it out and finding him.
Yet he was back with his pecs out this summer for The Legend Of Tarzan, a blockbuster that, like many in 2016, struggled at the box office. He says he was drawn in by the characters search for a place in the world and impressed by Harry Potter director David Yatess ability to make a 140m film feel intimate. But it was in some ways a change of scale. I work mostly in independent movies so the scope of Tarzan was definitely different, Skarsgrd says. I didnt feel pressured [by the box office demands] though. It wasnt like: Oh beep, this is a big movie. It was an incredible experience, but it was also nine months of just gym, work and bed. I didnt have a sip of alcohol. It was robotic.
Which explains the appeal of War On Everyone, a film in which he both downs and takes shots in every direction. Skarsgrd plays Terry, a perma-drunk, Glen Campbell-obsessed, unapologetically corrupt detective partnered with the lightning-witted Bob, played by The Martians Michael Pea. Its the old bad cop/worse cop routine, but laced with fierce cleverness. Where Shane Blacks The Nice Guys were bumbling dunces, McDonaghs pair trade wisecracks peppered with esoteric references to everyone from Simone de Beauvoir to realist painter Andrew Wyeth.
Their cocaine-fuelled romp takes them through an Albuquerque inexplicably peopled with Quaker bank robbers and burqa-wearing tennis players as the duo go in search of a missing million dollars and that most evil villain of all: a member of the English upper class. Its wildly irreverent, the tone set by an opening scene in which the pair try to knock down a mime (to see if hell make a sound). Likewise, McDonaghs script lives up to its name by making puckish jokes on any subject you care to think of. Skarsgrd, hunching his lean frame into a stoop, relishes it.
Its so un-PC, its so me, says Skarsgrd. You could tell John didnt give a beep about anything, which I found refreshing in a script. Id read a couple of comedies but nothing that was fun or intelligent enough. When I got this script and it was dark and twisted and weird and completely out there, I was exci