A Guide To Alexander Skarsgård Playing Horrible, Despicable, No Good, Evil Men

Spoilers for The Northman

Our first stop will be Mr. Skarsgård’s most recent appearance on the big screen, that of Amleth in Robert Eggers’ new gory viking revenge epic. And now you might be saying, Matthew, Alexander plays the hero in this film. He is after all basically Hamlet and Hamlet is the good guy who is avenging his father! (Well, brief side-tangent there: Shakespeare’s play was actually based on an old Scandinavian character called Amleth, so it was ole Billy Shakes who was doing the letter shuffling. Eggers’s movie, however, is only loosely based on either version as both the original Amleth and Hamlet are much more brainy and less hulking in their versions, but I digress). 

But Mr. Amleth (if I may be so bold) is truly a terrible human. After his father (who seemed mostly into war and farting) is murdered by his uncle, Amleth eventually becomes a mercenary who kills randos while imbued with a wolf spirit (not the last time you’ll see that on this tour). He has no extracurriculars aside from killing and hunting down his uncle. He doesn’t care about collateral damage. And he never does the therapeutic work to move past his father’s death and find happiness as a fisherman, or whatever one does in ancient Iceland. When his mother (Nicole Kidman) tells him that she wanted her husband dead, and is happier with the uncle who likes farming, Amleth kills his mum and her new kid. When given the opportunity to flee with his hot young partner (Anya Taylor-Joy), he opts to go fight his uncle naked in a volcano instead. His reasoning is that the uncle will track them down and kill them all. But, Amleth, let’s be real now. It’s like 600 CE. They don’t have Find My Friends. Move to some random farm in Finland, raise your twins, and you’ll be fine. 

Being dead-set on revenge is not cute. It’s called toxic masculinity. Go see Björk’s witch doctor, who I assume is the medieval equivalent to Better Help, and let’s get past this parental trauma. Even when Alex is playing a good guy, it’s really a bad guy. (But perhaps the true villain is whoever decided to cast Skarsgård [45] as poor Nicole Kidman’s [54] son only a few years after he played her wife. Yikes.) 

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