‘Hope’ conquers fear
Stellan Skarsgard brings friends’ cancer battle to big screen
Stellan Skarsgard is a true showbiz survivor, acting since his teens.
Yet the justly acclaimed “Hope,” at the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s Virtual Screening Room on Friday, finds Skarsgard in very strange territory.
“Hope” is the autobiographical story of writerdirector Maria Sodahl, who just before one Christmas was told she had metastatic, incurable cancer with a perhaps inoperable brain tumor.
Sodahl obviously survived to make her film that begins with the disclaimer, “As I remember it.”
But how strange for Skarsgard to make this with the woman who lived it, who was directing him as she recreated it for filmgoers?
“It’s even stranger than that because her husband is my friend Hans Petter Moland who I’ve done six films with,” Skarsgard said earlier this week from London.
Those films include “In Order of Disappearance,” which Hollywood remade with Liam Neeson as “Cold Pursuit.”
“I play him, I know her very well and I remember when they went through this ordeal. So there’s a lot of strangeness.
“But what you have to do is, as always, shave all that stuff away. I don’t play her husband, I cannot do that — and he wouldn’t be good either because,” he joked, “he speaks so slowly it would be boring. But he’s a good director.”
But when Sodahl first asked him, Skarsgard was thinking, “She wants to do a film about her cancer? I said, ‘No! Not another cancer movie.’ ”
Then he received “just two pages” and everything changed.
“What I could see already was this soberness with which she attacked the material. The absolute honesty. I also saw that it was funny. And that she had a distance to the material. So I said yes.”
“Hope,” already optioned by Nicole Kidman for an English-language series remake, defines a deeply personal experience for a couple who had three children alongside three more from his first marriage.
“Everything in the film happened as it happened,” Skarsgard said.
“Andrea Braein Hovig, who plays the female lead so fantastically, doesn’t resemble Maria at all. I don’t resemble Hans. Maria was not interested in doing a documentary.
“But the funny thing was, it was dramatically perfectly built because it did happen in one week, over Christmas. That’s such a great idea isn’t it?
“Everything that happened was there. The doctors were real doctors and the nurses as well.
“But it’s also very little a movie about cancer — cancer is the big shadow throughout the movie.
“It’s much more a love story — and a story about family.”