Stellan Skarsgard: ‘It’s an artist’s duty to be offensive’

Stellan Skarsgard is distressed whenever he is cast in anything. It seems a curious reaction for an actor, not least one with more than 150 credits in a career spanning half a century. “Every time I say yes to something I regret it,” he tells me over Zoom. “I immediately get very tense in the neck and I start to hyperventilate. I’m really scared until I’ve been [on set] for a couple of days and then I feel at home. But the fear is always there.”

This anxiety is hard to reconcile with the array of commanding performances that the 70-year-old Swede has given in films such as Good Will Hunting, Nymphomaniac, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the TV series Chernobyl, for which he won a Golden Globe last year. But it’s easier to see why he may have had some misgivings about his latest film, Hope.

Not only does the Norwegian drama deal with terminal illness, it tells the semi-autobiographical story of its writer-director, Maria Sodahl, who defied her fatal diagnosis. Furthermore, Skarsgard’s character, Tomas, is a fictionalised version of Sodahl’s film-maker husband, Hans Petter Moland, with whom Skarsgard has made five features. How did he feel about immersing himself in the private lives and traumas of these close friends?

“I felt pressure when she asked me if I wanted to be in it, and I was worried whether she had enough distance from it to not be self-indulgent,” he tells me. “I thought: ‘Do we need another fucking cancer movie?’ But then she sent me two pages and it was also obviously a love story . . . It’s about all the years before the cancer came. It’s about what happens in a family and a relationship when people stop paying attention.”

If Hope is the thing with feathers, then under Sodahl’s direction it rises above maudlin sentimentality. Films about dying rarely feel so alive. It does not treat the imminent death of Anja (Sodahl’s alter-ego, played by Andrea Braein Hovig) as a poetic, abstract concept that beatifies the sick person and their family. Instead, it approaches it as something unmistakably human. In this way, Sodahl joins the Scandinavian tradition, from Kierkegaard to Knausgaard, of broaching death with openness and worldliness. Why is this region so skilled at dealing with the subject in its art?

“We have much fewer taboos than the Anglo-Saxons,” Skarsgard says. “In America they [debate] what age you should start talking to the kids about sex, about death. We talk about it as soon as they start asking. The film is Scandinavian in its straightforwardness when it comes to big questions. It’s very pragmatic.”

That said, Hope also contains highly emotive scenes, most notably those that interlace the dread of the illness with the malaise at the heart of Anja and Tomas’s relationship, and their attempts to communicate more candidly and tenderly than ever before.

I ask Skarsgard how he and Hovig, strangers before making this film, were able to recreate a complex dynamic driven by 20 years of unarticulated love and dissatisfaction. “If you work with good actors, you know how to instantly create a relationship. And we’ve both been married for years so we know what a marriage is, which helped. You can say I prepared for several decades,” he laughs.

Perhaps Skarsgard’s greatest asset is that he fits into whatever he’s cast in, be it quiet human dramas, outré arthouse pieces, macabre thrillers or sunny musicals. I wonder if he chooses such incongruous parts to stave off any complacency or boredom.

“It’s very conscious. When you’ve done some obscure and very dark films on a very low budget, it’s really nice to go and do a big fluffy Hollywood film, and vice versa,” he says. “I don’t want the audience to feel safe when they see me. I want them to feel like they shouldn’t know what’s coming.”

For all the variety of his work, Skarsgard is perhaps most readily associated with playing intense, unnerving and outright monstrous figures, as seen most recently in Dune, in which he plays the grotesquely glabrous and obese Baron Harkonnen. Why is he so often cast as a villain?

When I started out in Hollywood, anyone who had an accent that wasn’t American was immediately defined as evil

“American xenophobia has a lot to do with it. When I started out in Hollywood, anyone who had an accent that wasn’t American was immediately defined as evil,” he says. “But playing the bad guy can be fun. The role in Dune, for instance, is nada. It’s three, four lines. But it was a challenge to create [a character] that has such a presence that you feel him throughout the film even when he isn’t on screen.”

Dune is just the latest big, commercial studio movie in which Skarsgard has appeared, following his roles in Thor and The Avengers, two Pirates of the Caribbean films, Mamma Mia! and its sequel. However, he has also frequently decried the decline of auteur cinema. Is this not a double standard?

“No,” he replies bluntly. “The problem is not the franchise films. The problem is in the Ponzi-scheme financial system we have that’s based on consuming more and producing more. It’s depriving every sector of any nuance, of anything that stands out. In film, all the small distributors, all the character-driven, medium-budget films that were about something, and that were the core of Hollywood in the 1970s, are disappearing. It’s like when you see the same exact shops in every fucking mall in the world.”

As a frequent collaborator of the controversial Lars Von Trier, and an actor who has relished taking on provocative projects, does he see this homogenisation of cinema as part of an aversion towards anything that might cause offence?

Art is not a commodity that should confirm the society we live in — it’s something that should challenge it

“The fear of the Twitterstorm gives a disproportionate power to very few people, but it definitely affects what’s written in the papers. I think it’s an artist’s duty to be offensive. The Impressionists were hated at the time and they’re [seen as] the sweetest thing now. We cannot censor ourselves. Art is not a commodity that should confirm the society we live in — it’s something that should challenge it.”

Despite his rather gloomy views on contemporary cinema, Skarsgard shows no signs of slowing down. While he tells me he’s already dreading donning his fat suit for the Dune sequel, he’s currently enjoying himself on location in Finland on the set of a film co-written by his wife, Megan Everett, and starring his son Gustaf (one of his eight children). “It’s called What Remains,” he says, a mischievous smile crossing his face. “Let’s see if it’s what remains of cinema.”

‘Hope’ is in UK cinemas from December 10

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