Alaxander Skarsgard talks about Generation Kill
I was looking through The Vault- a website for the show True Blood- and i came across this interview with Alexander Skarsgard and thought you all would enjoy it. The last three question or so center around his role in Generation Kill and one of them even addresses one of my favorite scenes in the mini series, Brad running around shirtless with airplane wings :) I love that even a year later the cast of GK still talk about being in the mini series. You can tell how much it impacted their lives.
The New Carnivore: Alexander Skarsgård
By Chris Mohney
December 18, 2009
As Eric Northman on HBO’s racy vampire saga True Blood, Alexander Skarsgård is not your average bloodsucker. Sure, he’s tall, pale and inclined to exsanguinations, but he rarely chews the scenery-or his co-stars-and his louche breed of boredom is a refreshing antidote to those pubescent Twilight lightweights. The 33-year-old actor, who says his character is “both a mirror and weird reflection of my personality,” masterfully embodies Northman’s above-it-all cool. And for good reason. He’s seen it all before-albeit on a smaller, Scandinavian scale-as the son of internationally respected actor Stellan Skarsgård.
The rumored swain of Evan Rachel Wood, Skarsgård became famous in his home country when he was only 13 for his performance in a breakout hit called The Dog That Smiled. He quit acting for almost a decade after that experience, but Skarsgård no longer fears exposure. “I’ve learned not to worry about that and not to let that affect me or my friends,” he says calmly. During production on his new movie, a remake of the Sam Peckinpah classic Straw Dogs (starring James Marsden and Kate Bosworth), fans drove all the way from Chicago to Shreveport, Louisiana, just to get his autograph. “Yeah, it can get a little intense,” he says. “But it’s a good thing. I haven’t had any bad experiences, knock on wood.”
You’ve said in other interviews that your experience of fame as a child actor was kind of scary and put you off acting for a few years and then in your early twenties you decided to give it another try. What motivated that change?
Well, I don’t know if “scary” is the right word. I did my first feature when I was seven back in Sweden. I never really considered it a profession or potential work for me in the future, I just thought of it as something fun. Then I did this movie when I was 13 and it got quite a lot of attention back in Scandinavia and it just made me very uncomfortable. It’s weird when you’re 13 to get all that attention. From the day I started working as an actor I wasn’t saying, “I’m gonna be a big star.” So it wasn’t a tough decision for me to stop. And my parents never pushed me. They said, “If you’re not passionate about this, if you don’t like all the attention, just do what you want to do.” And I did for seven years. And then when I was 20, like most people that age, I started thinking about what to do with my future and potential careers and obviously acting came up again. I realized that I had a strong urge to be on a stage again. I missed acting and I also knew that the fact I quit had nothing to do with the craft, with the work itself, it had to do with everything around it. So I figured it might be different now that I was 20 as opposed to when I was 13.
You felt more able to deal with it, at that point, maturity wise.
I was still young but I felt that at least I wasn’t 13. I felt that I kind of owed it to myself to give it another go and see how I felt about it. Then I went to study at a drama school in New York and from day one I knew how much I missed it and how much I loved it, so, you know, after that I’ve never looked back.
In Generation Kill the character you played, Ice Man, who is based on a real soldier, is very reserved and the performance itself was similarly restrained, but the scene that I really liked and that a lot of people have commented on, is the one where you’re, for lack of a better word, flying around in that field where everyone’s camped. How did that particular scene come about?
It happened. It happened for real. Reading the book and the script I just loved that moment so much. It’s towards the end of their journey, they’re almost outside of Baghdad at that point, they’ve gone through all this madness. It’s just this moment where [my character] Colbert, who is the Ice Man, and is always strong, just has to become a child again for just a few seconds. He just has to let all that out for a brief moment and be the guy who leaves his gun behind and just enjoys the moment, which he hasn’t done up until then.
I know that you had decided not to talk to the man you were playing during the filming, but that you met him after. Did you talk about that specific moment with him?
I don’t remember. We talked, I’m pretty sure we did, we talked about everything. I picked his brain for hours. It was just such a big moment for me to sit down and meet with him and talk to him about the whole journey, and his take on the series, how he felt about what we did with it, how we portrayed him and his fellow marines.
Was he pleased?
I’m still alive so I guess. He seemed to like it. It would be tough for him because it was personal. Everything I say on the show, talking about his ex-girlfriend, and hookers and all that stuff, it’s real, it’s quotes from real life. He never asked for this to become a huge HBO series. This is stuff he said in front of his men, inside the humvee, and yes, he knew that there was a journalist back there, but after a couple of days you forget that the guy’s a journalist. When you’re tired, and you’ve been on the road for a couple days it’s hard to censor yourself. But I think that he liked what we did and felt that it was a portrait of what they went through out there. That meant everything to me to hear that.
On the flip side of Ice Man you have Eric Northman in True Blood, who’s very flamboyant and predatory, if vulnerable. Which of these characters feels closer to your real personality than the other?
I think both of them are born inside of me. I always use my own feelings and experiences in portraying a character so I think they’re both a mirror of my personality and a weird reflection of my personality. Also, for me as an actor, to be able to go from playing Ice Man for seven months to playing a character like Eric that’s the polar opposite-- someone who’s flamboyant, who likes the attention, who’s always in the center--gave me tons of creativity. I wouldn’t want to play the same character in ten different projects in a row.
A friend of mine mentioned that in the love triangle you have going on in the show, she likes is that it seems like Eric and Bill spend as much time staring deeply into each others’ eyes as Bill and Sookie do. And of course then Evan Rachel Wood’s character told you guys to just to do it already. How do you guys feel about how that relationship is going?
Eric and Bill? I love it. I think that it’s so much fun for Eric to toy with Bill, because Bill is so serious, he’s so young and naïve in a way, and Eric enjoys that. Bill’s so, “Oh, I’m in love and I’m going to save Sookie,” and to Eric, Bill’s not even two-hundred years old, so to Eric he’s just a little baby. Eric knows he’s in control and he’s in power and he really enjoys all those moments and seeing Bill upset and angry, because to Eric it’s not a real threat.
The New Carnivore: Alexander Skarsgård
By Chris Mohney
December 18, 2009
As Eric Northman on HBO’s racy vampire saga True Blood, Alexander Skarsgård is not your average bloodsucker. Sure, he’s tall, pale and inclined to exsanguinations, but he rarely chews the scenery-or his co-stars-and his louche breed of boredom is a refreshing antidote to those pubescent Twilight lightweights. The 33-year-old actor, who says his character is “both a mirror and weird reflection of my personality,” masterfully embodies Northman’s above-it-all cool. And for good reason. He’s seen it all before-albeit on a smaller, Scandinavian scale-as the son of internationally respected actor Stellan Skarsgård.
The rumored swain of Evan Rachel Wood, Skarsgård became famous in his home country when he was only 13 for his performance in a breakout hit called The Dog That Smiled. He quit acting for almost a decade after that experience, but Skarsgård no longer fears exposure. “I’ve learned not to worry about that and not to let that affect me or my friends,” he says calmly. During production on his new movie, a remake of the Sam Peckinpah classic Straw Dogs (starring James Marsden and Kate Bosworth), fans drove all the way from Chicago to Shreveport, Louisiana, just to get his autograph. “Yeah, it can get a little intense,” he says. “But it’s a good thing. I haven’t had any bad experiences, knock on wood.”
You’ve said in other interviews that your experience of fame as a child actor was kind of scary and put you off acting for a few years and then in your early twenties you decided to give it another try. What motivated that change?
Well, I don’t know if “scary” is the right word. I did my first feature when I was seven back in Sweden. I never really considered it a profession or potential work for me in the future, I just thought of it as something fun. Then I did this movie when I was 13 and it got quite a lot of attention back in Scandinavia and it just made me very uncomfortable. It’s weird when you’re 13 to get all that attention. From the day I started working as an actor I wasn’t saying, “I’m gonna be a big star.” So it wasn’t a tough decision for me to stop. And my parents never pushed me. They said, “If you’re not passionate about this, if you don’t like all the attention, just do what you want to do.” And I did for seven years. And then when I was 20, like most people that age, I started thinking about what to do with my future and potential careers and obviously acting came up again. I realized that I had a strong urge to be on a stage again. I missed acting and I also knew that the fact I quit had nothing to do with the craft, with the work itself, it had to do with everything around it. So I figured it might be different now that I was 20 as opposed to when I was 13.
You felt more able to deal with it, at that point, maturity wise.
I was still young but I felt that at least I wasn’t 13. I felt that I kind of owed it to myself to give it another go and see how I felt about it. Then I went to study at a drama school in New York and from day one I knew how much I missed it and how much I loved it, so, you know, after that I’ve never looked back.
In Generation Kill the character you played, Ice Man, who is based on a real soldier, is very reserved and the performance itself was similarly restrained, but the scene that I really liked and that a lot of people have commented on, is the one where you’re, for lack of a better word, flying around in that field where everyone’s camped. How did that particular scene come about?
It happened. It happened for real. Reading the book and the script I just loved that moment so much. It’s towards the end of their journey, they’re almost outside of Baghdad at that point, they’ve gone through all this madness. It’s just this moment where [my character] Colbert, who is the Ice Man, and is always strong, just has to become a child again for just a few seconds. He just has to let all that out for a brief moment and be the guy who leaves his gun behind and just enjoys the moment, which he hasn’t done up until then.
I know that you had decided not to talk to the man you were playing during the filming, but that you met him after. Did you talk about that specific moment with him?
I don’t remember. We talked, I’m pretty sure we did, we talked about everything. I picked his brain for hours. It was just such a big moment for me to sit down and meet with him and talk to him about the whole journey, and his take on the series, how he felt about what we did with it, how we portrayed him and his fellow marines.
Was he pleased?
I’m still alive so I guess. He seemed to like it. It would be tough for him because it was personal. Everything I say on the show, talking about his ex-girlfriend, and hookers and all that stuff, it’s real, it’s quotes from real life. He never asked for this to become a huge HBO series. This is stuff he said in front of his men, inside the humvee, and yes, he knew that there was a journalist back there, but after a couple of days you forget that the guy’s a journalist. When you’re tired, and you’ve been on the road for a couple days it’s hard to censor yourself. But I think that he liked what we did and felt that it was a portrait of what they went through out there. That meant everything to me to hear that.
On the flip side of Ice Man you have Eric Northman in True Blood, who’s very flamboyant and predatory, if vulnerable. Which of these characters feels closer to your real personality than the other?
I think both of them are born inside of me. I always use my own feelings and experiences in portraying a character so I think they’re both a mirror of my personality and a weird reflection of my personality. Also, for me as an actor, to be able to go from playing Ice Man for seven months to playing a character like Eric that’s the polar opposite-- someone who’s flamboyant, who likes the attention, who’s always in the center--gave me tons of creativity. I wouldn’t want to play the same character in ten different projects in a row.
A friend of mine mentioned that in the love triangle you have going on in the show, she likes is that it seems like Eric and Bill spend as much time staring deeply into each others’ eyes as Bill and Sookie do. And of course then Evan Rachel Wood’s character told you guys to just to do it already. How do you guys feel about how that relationship is going?
Eric and Bill? I love it. I think that it’s so much fun for Eric to toy with Bill, because Bill is so serious, he’s so young and naïve in a way, and Eric enjoys that. Bill’s so, “Oh, I’m in love and I’m going to save Sookie,” and to Eric, Bill’s not even two-hundred years old, so to Eric he’s just a little baby. Eric knows he’s in control and he’s in power and he really enjoys all those moments and seeing Bill upset and angry, because to Eric it’s not a real threat.