Alexander Skarsgård had to step outside of his comfort zone for Wicker — but probably not for the reason you think.
The oddball fable from directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer made its premiere at this weekend’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where audiences were treated to a delightfully weird premise: Wicker tells the tale of a fisherwoman who asks a basketmaker to weave her a husband. The man made of sticks is played by none other than Skarsgård, who admits that the biggest challenge wasn’t playing a woven man but playing a character with wholly good intentions.
“I was quite intimidated when I read it because I tend to be drawn towards more conflicted characters with more internal turmoil and darkness,” Skarsgård said during the Saturday Q&A attended by Entertainment Weekly. “And to play this good-hearted, good natured, sweet, morally righteous character was scary to me. I’m not really comfortable doing that.”
As the audience laughed, Skarsgård quipped, “I don’t have anything to tap into when it comes to that, so it was a stretch as an actor.”
Aidan Monaghan / Focus Features, LLC Alexander Skarsgard stars as Amleth in ‘The Northman’
Indeed, Skarsgård has tended towards darker, much more morally-ambiguous characters. His initial rise to fame came from playing cunning and ruthless centuries-old vampire Eric Northman on True Blood. More recently, he’s played an abusive husband on Big Little Lies, a sociopathic tech mogul on Succession, and a vengeance-seeking viking caked in dirt and blood in The Northman. Needless to say, the nice wicker man was something entirely new. But Skarsgård was happy to embrace the change.
“I thought it was an incredible script,” he said of the film. “It’s a fable, but it’s also an allegory. It’s a story about our society, but without being heavy-handed or didactic or preachy. It was so funny and sweet, and obviously a very interesting character to play.”
Later in the conversation, Skarsgård addressed the obvious challenge presented by the role: that playing a man of wicker made it harder to control his face, one of an actor’s most important tools.
“Rigidity was a big part of it, and that came naturally to me,” he joked of the physical challenge. “And awkwardness, also easy. And then we played around a little bit with the evolution of the character. Watching it now was quite interesting, cause they clearly worked on it with the sound design as well and the creaking in the beginning when the wicker is all fresh and new. And then we wanted to play with the rigidity of that. As the wicker husband warms up and gets a bit comfortable.”
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Skarsgård explained that the same thing was applied to his facial expressions, to assure that the character loosened up over the course of the film. But because of the wicker glued to his face, this meant that during “very emotionally vulnerable” scenes with Colman, while her face “just explodes on camera” his expression was rather still.
“Nothing happened,” Skarsgård recalled. “I have exaggerated everything. And that kind of contradicts your instinct as an actor. So I felt ridiculous, but it was just about trusting these guys and when they came up and were like, ‘Can you just give us a bit more eyebrow action?’ I’m like, ‘Okay.'”
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