Harding about his ed Bird, as well as the nd the upcoming Dune
st nd d can
. d d e le od hat side of you ut.” n a gruelling run of e, but Skarsgård has gy when it comes to career, which has cts as diverse and entertaining as Good Will Hunting, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Mamma Mia! and the Thor films.
“I am not planning my life or my career but I’m attracted to material that I don’t see every day on television or in the cinema,” he says. “When it comes to writing, I said I would never do a police show because I find them extremely cliche and boring most of the time and I’m really not good at saying all those police lines, but then Abi Morgan came and gave me a 60-page script, which was something else (the 2015 BBC drama River). “You see someone who doesn’t write in a conventional way, doesn’t try to imitate something that already has been done and that is where you can add new life to a way of telling a story. “With Chernobyl, was very happy because it was about something that is important to us all today, the importance of actually listening to the scientists and not oppressing the truth, there are different reasons. “If you boil down everything
II’ve done, you will find something, even in the way I play the characters, you will find a mirror of my ideologies, my ideas about humanity. But as a hired hand, which you are as an actor, it’s very hard to have an imprint on things in the way you do if you are a painter or a writer.”
Next up is his Dune villain, a role he seems to have tackled with glee.
“We will see how it will be received but I really wanted to do it for the joy of working with Denis Villeneuve (the director), who is such a wonderful man and also such a great filmmaker.
“I had one job, be horrifying, and I think I can do it. But it’s also fun because I had to look like I had a body of about 400lb or so, there is a lot of prosthetics, I think I spent far more time in make-up than I spent in front of the camera.
“Five or six hours a day in make-up and it’s pretty hard on you, but I didn’t film more than eight or 10 days or something like that.”
While Sweden did not lock down during the pandemic, the international nature of Skarsgård’s schedule means he has not been able to work much of late.
“The first thing I did was two weeks ago, when we did an additional scene for Dune in Hungary, and it is complicated because there are a lot of tests you have to go through. On the set, they test you every second day and they take your temperature every day and there are a lot of restrictions.
“I can’t wait to get back to work and I think the next thing I will do is the Star Wars TV series (an untitled show about Cassian Andor). That was supposed to go in June and now they are saying November, but of course it depends on if Britain has more lockdowns.”
Here’s hoping we get to hear that laugh again soon.
The Painted Bird is available digitally and in selected cinemas in the UK and Ireland now.