Who doesn’t have a decades long obsession with the Skarsgards? I actually remember watching films with the Alpha, Stellan, before I ever knew he had kids. There are half a dozen of them, but we’re concentrating on the oldest for this essay.
I’d seen Alex Skarsgard in work before True Blood, but that’s really when his career was solidified. Tall, blonde, Scandinavian. He’s just everything perfect about everything that isn’t offensive put into one lean package. He is the Colgate bottle with personality.
He could have spent his entire career playing empty roles that just showcased beauty, everyone would have continued to watch it, but he veered off course after True Blood. He played an abusive husband in Big Little Lies. Then he had memorable cameos in Atlanta, Eastbound & Down, and On Becoming a God in Central Florida. No one that just knew him as Eric Northman could believe that he would take on these quirky roles just by that career-making character.
Skarsgard is something unique; he’s a character actor in a cinema star body. This is a guy that reads the entire script and picks up the novel if it’s based on one. I think the reason we aren’t allowed to know that collectively is that there is an unspoken rule that extremely attractive people have to be dumb. It keeps the averages from rioting by believing that there is definitely a balance with luck and it doesn’t work out that perfect for everyone.
I think he takes it a step farther and chooses his roles with purpose. After Big Little Lies and a few other co-starring roles, my spidey senses always went off when he came onto the screen. I knew that there was something about him that wasn’t going to be right. When he starred in the final season of Succession, I knew he had to be a really bad guy. That’s the beauty of his work, but I think you can also call it privilege.
From Big Little Lies to The Diary of a Teenage Girl he is allowed to play these deplorable charcters that are allowed a story arc. If someone were just close to unattractive-leaning or overweight and played half of the characters he has in the past decade audiences would believe that they were monsters in real life. He’s allowed that privilege of the benefit of the doubt, and then you allow his character to have their say.
There were conversations about why exactly he beat his wife in Big Little Lies. Think of all the actors that could pick up that role and that question would never be asked. The Diary of a Teenage Girl was hard for me. I knew that they were using his looks and the naivete he brought to the character to ask questions about his behavior, but I couldn’t buy it, though I understood why he was shown grace.
When I saw the trailer for Pillion, I knew immediatley he had done it again. A sub-culture of the LGBTQ community was shown in honesty and complexity and it was greenlit? It’s because they had Eric Northman playing the lead. He uses his privilege to bring awareness to communities that are otherwise not seen or ignored. How many actors that look like him and come from famous families, have you seen take those kinds of chances in films? He doesn’t even do it for prestige pieces that will guarantee an Oscar. He signs up for small budget, character-driven pieces that most likely wouldn’t be made if he wasn’t a castmember.
I didn’t know anything about this community before the film. Once I understood it, I saw what he was bringing to the character. Regardless of the way those men lived their lives, if the guy looks like Skarsgard, of course you’re going to enter the scenario with pre-conceived notions. He plays the dom, Ray, that picks up Colin, the sub, in a bar on Christmas Eve. You can’t play 80’s music in a bar on Christmas Eve and have Skarsgard pick you up and everyone in the audience isn’t rooting for a happy ending. It wasn’t a sad ending, it was just an ending that played out realistically, but it ebbed a bit.
Pillion gives you hope in the most unlikely of situations, and has you rooting for everyone. The key to the film was Skarsgard. He played that character with zero remorse and it would take someone that looked like him to enter normal spaces and not apologize for the space he took up. Anyone else in that role and characters would be able to throw a “freak” slur, but even when he’s questioned about it, he answers as if he’s telling the weather. What do you call it when someone that looks like the epitome of elevated normalcy represents the fringe?
This wouldn’t be an essay of mine without us deep-diving into the superficial. I’ve told you before that skinny guys don’t pick up on my radar, but this skinny guy always does. He can’t be that special. Then someone explained it to me. He has a running back’s bone structure with a swimmer’s body. Where he’s broad at the shoulders, but the chest down just tapers in like a runway model. Yes, I googled how does a ribcage concave, we don’t need me to explain it. His fashion choices are always the best on the red carpet.
Watch this meet cute film when you have a chance. It makes you think and it makes you root for the underdog, which in this case is simply being from the outskirts.