The legend of tarzan
Alexander Skarsgård welcomes you to the jungle.
With over 50 films to his name, few characters can rival the cinematic footprint of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ pulp hero Tarzan. The loinclothclad king of the jungle has done it all – from the silent serials of the ’20s to Disney’s ’99 animation. But unlike most Tarzan tales, which seek to tame the ape-raised wild man by transporting him from his verdant homeland to tea-sipping civilisation, The Legend Of
Tarzan operates in reverse and sees Alexander Skarsgård’s abtastic vine-swinger return to the Congo after living in London as gentrified nobleman John Clayton III for almost a decade.
“What was so interesting about this and what made it different was, on page one, he’s not in the jungle and not wearing a loincloth. He’s drinking tea with the Prime Minister in a buttoned-up Victorian England – very polite and proper,” a similarly courteous Alexander Skarsgård tells Total Film. “Instead of all those old movies where it’s about taming the beast, it’s about releasing the beast.” More than a decade in the making itself,
The Legend Of Tarzan’s production has seen Guillermo del Toro, Stephen Sommers, Craig Brewer and a veritable tribe of writers come and go over the years, until director David Yates chose the film as his first post- Potter project. In a move mirroring the casting of Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan in the 1930s, flipper-footed athlete Michael Phelps was also rumoured to make his showbiz debut in the film, before Yates settled on True Blood’s enigmatic master vamp Alexander Skarsgård.
Hulking 6’4” frame aside, Skarsgård was an ideal fit for the hero torn between worlds
precisely because the Swedish-born Hollywood star has his own divided geographical loyalties. “He has this wonderful quality of not belonging to one or the other,” Yates told USA Today, an assertion Skarsgård seems a touch concerned about when TF puts it to him. “I’ve got to talk to my shrink about this!” he laughs. “No, he’s probably right. I grew up in Stockholm; that said America’s been my home for a very long time… Somewhere in the middle of Iceland, maybe?”
Tarzan’s latest legend may kick off in Victorian London, but the action quickly moves to the plains of Africa when the king of the swingers is invited home as an emissary of Parliament alongside Samuel L. Jackson’s gun-toting American George Washington Williams. But Tarzan is little more than a pawn in the masterplan of Christoph Waltz’s calculating Captain Rom, a plan involving a tribal leader with a personal debt to settle and the historically inspired occupation of the Congo by Belgian King Leopold II. Also along for the ride, of course, is Tarzan’s true love Jane Porter, played by Margot Robbie. But Robbie had no interest in her Jane being another prototypical screaming dame.
“I wanted her to be fiercely independent,” Robbie explains. “I wanted her to be incredibly defiant, almost to a fault sometimes, and cool under pressure. She’s incredibly strong and grounded. I wanted that to be evident when she was in situations of danger.” With a budget equal to this summer’s city-levelling superhero smackdowns, Tarzan is set to offer the kind of spectacle almost a century of big-screen adaptations could only dream of, with vertiginous swinging to rival Spider-Man and ape scraps that make Leo’s ursine brawl in
The Revenant look like a bear hug. Describing it as “an epic action-adventure film, with an epic love story at the heart of it” Robbie was most impressed by Potter production designer Stuart Craig’s awe-inspiring sets. “In the back lot of Leavesden they built a jungle, a 90ft boat, a river for the boat to go in, a colonial town, a waterfall that really has tons and tons of water coming out every second. It was the most insane thing I’ve ever seen.” And for someone who’s spent the last year snuggling up to The Joker, that’s saying something.