Wicker is this year’s most unexpected delight. A remarkably confident second feature film from writer-director couple Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, Wicker tells the story of a lonely, misanthropic fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who asks a master wicker craftsman (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband. He complies and imbues the resulting wicker golem (Alexander Skarsgård) with a soul. This strange marriage awakens the heart and loins of the fisherwoman and, in its reversal of traditional medieval gender roles, causes chaos in her village. Wicker is presented as a fable. Each character is named after their work, and while it contains far more sexcapades than your typical Brothers Grimm story, its ending still feels ripped straight from their pages. The film’s marriage of the libidinal and the folkloric not only leads to great gags, but deepens its investigation into the nature of marital bliss.
The film is so packed with winning performances that it might be easy to forget how good Alexander Skarsgård is as the wicker husband. The role is deceptively simple – the film’s running joke is that Husband is naive and doesn’t understand the subtext – but with an abundance of grace notes, Skarsgård does a lot. The wicker husband begins to walk with a stiff gait, his every movement accompanied by the sounds of straining wood fiber. He speaks hesitantly, in subject-predicate-object declarative sentences, and has no hidden agendas. But as the film progresses, Skarsgård’s movements become more fluid without ever seeming quite human. His eyes, originally so stoic, begin to convey the things he doesn’t know how to say. By the time he and Fisherwoman perform a very modern slow dance at a wedding and he turns to her and says, “You are the reason I live and breathe,” it is unclear whether he is declaring his love or simply stating the facts about how he was born.
Her resume is filled with bold moves, bizarre choices, and about a quintillion sexual encounters. scenes.
The fact that we can consider a golem’s capacity for love is a testament to Skarsgård’s gentleness and finesse. The smartest decision made by Fischer and Wilson is not to use motion capture, but to put Skarsgård in a real wicker suit with numerous prosthetics. This allows him to radiate his natural humanity, even if it made tasks as mundane as eating lunch on set torture. Skarsgård’s performance is the quietest in the film, but in its subtlety and warmth it is wonderfully moving. We probably shouldn’t expect any less from him now. Over a two-decade career spanning everything from campy vampire TV shows to small indie films, Skarsgård has turned in dozens of performances that are as carefully honed as they are understated. If he rarely appears on the list of important actors, it is perhaps because of his refusal to show himself, his preference for micro-detail rather than broad gesture.
I can’t help but think of Alexander Skarsgård’s IMDb page. This is not the list of credits, nor the reminder of his few vain attempts to become a successful celebrity. Instead, it’s the two photos at the top of the page, one of which shows him in a charcoal blazer and heavy cotton black T-shirt, his light eyes shining, an insincere smile on the red carpet crinkling his eyes. The other, filmed at the MTV Movie Awards ten years ago, presents us with a different Skarsgård. From the waist up he wears a tuxedo, but he doesn’t wear pants. The shadow of a smile is present at the edges, but in this photo he tries to keep a straight face, the seriousness of his pose making the image all the more ridiculous. There is something essential about Skarsgård captured here, the tension between solemnity and mischief, the impassive face inherent to the Scandinavians, the versatility of his eyes. And of course, its impossible beauty.
Loving Alexander Skarsgård should be a challenge. He’s built like an Aryan Superman and he’s a nepo baby. Yet he is so attractive, so captivating to watch and ultimately so talented that you can’t help but be won over by him. Her resume is filled with bold moves, bizarre choices, and about a quintillion sex scenes. He’s refreshingly free of a star’s typical need to be liked or to assert a consistent type across projects. And, although his physical appearance prevents him from disappearing into a role, almost every character he brings to life feels distinct and has a unique inner life that he evokes for the audience.
If you want to see very quickly what makes Skarsgård so compelling on screen, watch his eyes. Not only does he have that quality that some actors possess where he seems able to shine a light behind them so that they shine, but you can see the character’s entire inner journey in them.
This is what drives his performance in Back seatyet another winning British film, also from this year, in which Skarsgård’s mysterious biker Ray takes Colin (Harry Melling), an awkward introvert, under his wing – or perhaps his boot – and becomes his master in an S&M romance. For all her provocative sex games, Back seat is a film that relies heavily on the unsaid. Neither Colin nor Ray are given much specificity in the storyline, and both men are unable to express themselves openly, Colin because of his shyness, Ray because of his brutal taciturnity. The film risks being either incredibly dark or cartoonish, but Melling and Skarsgård find the care and affection in the relationship that makes it bearable and turns what could be simple abuse into a complex problem. Skarsgård’s eyes forever reveal to us that Ray’s restraint comes from his own inadequacies. He is afraid of intimacy and is almost incapable of functioning when presented with real feelings. In one sequence, Colin intentionally burns his hands in order to achieve emotional catharsis while mourning his mother. Skarsgård wordlessly communicates Ray’s confusion when he sees Colin screaming in rage and pain, in the same way that comforting another human being is, for Ray, a difficult and treacherous endeavor. It’s a perfect setup for the eventual end of the two men’s relationship, which happens without a word, as Skarsgård somehow extinguishes the inner glow in his eyes.
I asked Marielle Heller, who directed Skarsgård in his surprising debut The Diary of a Teenager, about that inner glow, and she said she found it as confusing as I did. “That’s the magic of actors,” Heller said. “You see it and you say, ‘Oh, that’s a movie star thing I can’t understand.’ » The Diary of a Teenager is one of several films in Skarsgård’s filmography that buck the conventional rules of cinematic stardom, films in which he plays despicable people and somehow makes them more dangerous by making them on a human scale. In DiaryIn Monroe’s case, this character begins a sexual affair with the titular teenager, Minnie (Bel Powley), who is not only 15 but is the daughter of his girlfriend Charlotte (Kristen Wiig). The film lives on a knife’s edge. Narrated by Minnie, who initially sees the “relationship” as both a transcendent love story and a sexual awakening, Diary treats the case with great complexity, trusting viewers to see the way in which Minnie is manipulated and exploited by Monroe. Likewise, Skarsgård never judges Monroe and leaves us guessing about his motivations. Is he a pedophile? An amoral fool? A male child caught up in San Francisco’s promise of sexual freedom in the 1970s? Does any of this really matter, given the impact of his actions on others?
“Alex is one of the people I refer to when I talk about what I want from an actor,” Heller said. “On the one hand, he’s very committed, he does all the preparation, but he’s also very open to being directed. He’s spectacularly nuanced and complex in his portrayal of characters, and not afraid to play dark or complicated characters.” He lacks, says Heller, the usual hang-ups of movie stars regarding their brand image and their ability to ingratiate themselves with the public. “He really cares character. He entered the film with a curiosity of how someone could have Monroe’s inclinations. My main memory is how fearless and curious he seemed.
Diary was Heller and Powley’s first film, and Heller says that on set, Skarsgård took on the role of “head of the drama department,” which she didn’t even realize she needed. “He sets the tone for everyone on how to act professionally on set. He’s a great scene partner. I have memories of him adjusting his body so Bel could be seen in the right light, but somehow he did it without ever seeming like he was doing it, or breaking character.” The three did extensive rehearsals before filming and broke down the script like a play, going beat by beat and developing the backstory of the characters, in order to be able to produce such an emotionally charged film in 24 days of shooting.
It’s not that Skarsgård can’t be likeable: he’s endlessly charming in Murderous robot Or Wicker or his various appearances on television or the Zoolander films, in which he dies in a freak accident due to a gasoline fight – but rather that he often does his most exciting work by going places that other frighteningly handsome men tend to avoid. Can you imagine, for example, one of the Canadian Chrises or Ryans signing on to play Nicole Kidman’s abusive husband in Big little lies? Would any of them do Infinity poolone of Skarsgård’s best films, in which he plays a failed author who meets a group of wealthy tourists in a…
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