Alexander was interviewed this week by Hanna Fahl, from Swedish Radio P3 Popular. Our friends at alexskarsgard.net have translated the full interview for our pleasure. Thanks ladies!
You can hear the audio interview here.
Alexander Johan Hjalmar Skarsgård was born on Aug.25, 1976 in Vällingby but grew up on Söder in Stockholm in what you could call a big family. Dad Stellan, Mom My, Alexander and his five siblings and all of his cousins all lived in the same house.
When Alexander was 4 yrs old a pre-school teacher took him to a “Our Theatre” and that is how the acting career started. He got his first part in a movie three years later when the 7-year-old Alexander got a part in Allan Edwall’s movie “Åke och hans värld”.
“Do you know how it is to be dead? First you lay still, then you get cold and then you get white”
As a teenager Alexander considered changing career and went to Leeds to study languages. But he never could forget the lime-light and applied to an acting school in New York. Back in Sweden, the now 22-years-old Alexander lived in the computer room at his parent’s while he did his first big
part in a TV-series.
It was as Marcus in “White Lies”. This was followed by “the dog-trick” and some other Swedish movies before he got his first part in a Hollywood movie in 2001. His part was as the not too bright model Meekus in Ben Stiller’s Zoolander.
Alexander have said that he was tired of playing harmless, feel-sorry-for-guys, but all of that changed when he got a part in the Iraq war-series Generation Kill and things were about to get even more PG-rated when he got the part as the 1000-year-old Viking vampire Eric Northman in True Blood.
Alexander Skarsgård was all of a sudden Hollywood’s new favorite simultaneously as one of our biggest movie stars. Now his current movie is opening in Sweden -he is doing the voices of one of the characters in Tarek Salek’s movie Metropia.
H: Alexander Skarsgård, welcome!
A: Thank you very much.
H:How long have you been back home in Sweden and for how long are you staying?
A: Since Saturday and I’m leaving tomorrow.
H: What is the first thing you do when you get back to Stockholm?
A: Head straight to mom’s.
H: Does she have something specific she always cooks for you when you get back home?
A: Yes, actually. She usually cooks pork-pancakes.
H: Really?!
A: Yeah.
H: Is it because you like it or because she thinks you like it?
A:Uhm.. no it’s because I do like it. Sometimes I even call her a couple of weeks before I get back and say “Hey, I get back on the 23rd and…”
H: Put the pork pancakes in motion…
A: Yeah, kill the pig… well, yeah that is usually the first thing I do.
H: Metropia opens here in a couple of weeks and , eeehh, is this the first time you do a voice to an animated movie?
A: Uhm…..yes. It is!
H: How do you do this? It seems really difficult to me!
A: Well, I’ve done some sort of dubbing before. It was something American that was being dubbed to Swedish. And it was more about following structured timeframes and following another person’s lips so that what I said in Swedish synched to that.
With Metropia we did the voices before, eehhh…and it’s not really an animate the movie. It’s pictures that they have and then they animate the moves. But long before they did that it was just me and Tarek, who is the Director, in a studio similar to this and we had a lot of freedom to just play around and have fun with it. We didn’t have to follow any timeframes and had could change things we weren’t happy with.
H: But had you seen anything from it so that you knew approximately how it would be?
A:Tarek had shown me a little bit. Ehm, he had explained…. Tarek is a very good friend of mine so I’ve been following this project during several years and heard him talk about it a lot and so….uuhhmmm.. long before that…I mean
I’ve always been a fan of the entire project long before Tarek asked me if I wanted to do one of the voices. I mean the way they’ve done it and when you watch the trailer you understand that it’s very very different from anything else. I thought it was totally fantastic concept and the story is too.
H: How much say did you have in creating your character?
A: Well..it really was a very creative process in that studio. We had a lot of fun together and talked about the character and if I felt that there was something that wasn’t right we could change it. And I was living in Africa during 7 months while doing another job, that was 2 years ago, so I was only home for a weekend and had only one day to nail this job and this was long before a lot of the rest of the crew was attached to the project and I have one scene with my Dad in the movie so we did that scene that day and then my Dad got to do the rest of his scenes like 2 months later. And it’s very
tricky to do a project like this because you don’t do the scenes together but you do them separately. So I did my lines and then Dad listened to what I’d done and added his lines. And then 2 years later you sit down and watch the whole scene between us… And it’s weird (laughs) because you know that you added your lines two months apart.
H: I actually have some of the scenes you do with your Dad and thought we’d listen to them.
A: You do!! That’s really great…
Cut’s to Metropia soundfiles.
H: Well, that is what it sounds like…the movie Metropia.
A:Yep.
H:This is the first time you and your Dad are in the same movie?
A: No it isn’t.
H: It’s not?
A: Ehmm… by the way, that is some background check you’ve done on my life. Always fun to find out…
H: Yeah!
A: You found out I was living in the computer room and stuff…
H: Yeah, we know more than you do (laughs)
A: But we were both in “Åke och hans värld”. You had a soundclip from that movie and I did it when I was 7. Ehm, Dad played a sleazy neighbour of someone. (laughs) That’s as I remember it. But the thing was that we didn’t have any scenes together in that so we have been in the same movie before. I also had a tiny part in a thing in Denmark we did some 10 years ago but that was like 20 seconds together so, ehm, this is the first bigger thing where we actually have a scene together.
H: But in this you weren’t even in the same place to do it.
A: No, it’s ironic and funny at the same time. The first job we get to be in together and we shoot our scene 2 months apart. But it was awesome to watch it because I did my parts 2 years ago. Dad did his 2 months later and heard what I’d done so he could listen to it and…
H: React to what you had done…
A: Yeah, so he had that to work from. And I watched the movie for the first time…it’s been screened at different festivals all over. Tarek has been travelling like a maniac for half-a-year now and I was staying in Shreeveport in Louisiana while shooting a movie there up to a month ago and Tarek was at a film festival in Austin in Texas. So I flew over there and that’s when I first got to watch the entire movie. And it was very surreal to finally see it 2 years after you did your lines in a studio and then all of a sudden you’re watching it on a big screene… And above all that scene with my Dad was very hard to watch.
Read the whole transcript at the alexskarsgard.net
Alexander Johan Hjalmar Skarsgård was born on Aug.25, 1976 in Vällingby but grew up on Söder in Stockholm in what you could call a big family. Dad Stellan, Mom My, Alexander and his five siblings and all of his cousins all lived in the same house. When Alexander was 4 yrs old a pre-school teacher took him to a “Our Theatre” and that is how the acting career started. He got his first part in a movie three years later when the 7-year-old Alexander got a part in Allan Edwall’s movie “Åke och hans värld”. Cue to the movie.. “Do you know how it is to be dead? First you lay still, then you get cold and then you get white” As a teenager Alexander considered changing career and went to Leeds to study languages. But he never could forget the lime-light and applied to an acting school in New York. Back in Sweden, the now 22-years-old Alexander lived in the computer room at his parent’s while he did his first big part in a TV-series. It was as Marcus in “White Lies”. This was followed by “the dog-trick” and some other Swedish movies before he got his first part in a Hollywood movie in 2001. His part was as the not too bright model Meekus in Ben Stiller’s Zoolander. Cue to movie - Zoolander… Alexander have said that he was tired of playing harmless, feel-sorry-for-guys, but all of that changed when he got a part in the Iraq war-series Generation Kill and things were about to get even more PG-rated when he got the part as the 1000-year-old Viking vampire Eric Northman in True Blood. Cue to True Blood… Alexander Skarsgård was all of a sudden Hollywood’s new favorite simultaneously as one of our biggest movie stars. Now his current movie is opening in Sweden - he is doing the voices of one of the characters in Tarek Salek’s movie Metropia.
