Alexander Skarsgard is “definitely not a method actor”.
The 'Northman' star doesn’t let his roles take over his life but he was left with the “impact” of his character after filming the new Robert Eggers movie.
The 45-year-old actor told Collider: “I'm definitely not a method actor, and it wasn't like I walked around and felt like Beowulf on the streets of New York, but I could definitely feel the impact that that experience had on me.”
Alexander - who portrays Amleth, a young Viking prince in the movie, which also stars Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman, Bjork and his brother Bill Skarsgard - called making the movie “incredibly emotional” due to what it brought up for him and the physicality.
He said: “I was overwhelmed, and it was incredibly emotional. It brought back a lot of memories from the Irish mud, when we were crawling around there. When you shoot a movie this way, since there are no cuts, what you see was exactly what happened and how I remembered it. So sometimes when you watch a movie, once after it's gone through a year of editing and reshaping sometimes, it can change quite a bit, but again, there are very few scenes in the movie with cuts. So it was very much the way I remembered it.”
The ‘Big Little Lies’ star says he “never been involved with a project” in his career but loved working with Robert and Lars Knudsen, the movie’s producer.
Alexander said: “I've never been more involved in a project, deeper, involved in a project. I've had the privilege of being part of this journey since the Genesis. I've been dreaming of making a Viking movie since I was a kid. And about 10 years ago Lars Knudsen, the Danish producer, and I teamed up and tried to figure out a way to actually make that happen. And we were playing around with different ideas and reading the old Icelandic, the poetry, the old Icelandic sagas, and trying to figure out which story to base it on. We knew that we wanted to capture the essence of those on the kind of the stark laconic language, the harshness of it. But it wasn't until I met Rob five ago, coincidentally, and it turned out that he had just been to Iceland and had fallen in love with the island and the culture, and we started talking about Norse mythology and Viking culture. And that became, well, the starting point for this crazy journey.”
