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"FacebookPinterest\n\n It's hard enough on a healthy male ego just kind of standing around a guy like Alexander Skarsg\u00E5rd, whose Viking physique, showcased to such great effect on HBO's True Blood, tends to make one feel small and soft and generally shabby in comparison. One does not need the extra discomfort of being humiliated by his dad. Skarsg\u00E5rd's father, Stellan, happens to be Sweden's biggest movie star, best known on these shores as the quadriplegic roughneck in Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves or as the Swedish travel writer performing off-key ABBA songs in Mamma Mia!, depending on how you like to think of yourself. I'd called Stellan in Stockholm and informed him I was going whale-watching with his son. \"Ever since he went whale-watching, he won't stop talking about it. Everybody has to go! It's a plague!\" he affectionately complained. Then came the setup: \"Listen,\" he said, the lugubrious voice oozing authority. \"Bring a sweater. It's cold out there.\"\n\n And so here I am, standing by the Long Beach docks in the brilliant sunshine of an eighty-five-degree California morning, dressed for the North Sea (winter hat, heavy sweater, windbreaker). Skarsg\u00E5rd the Younger is attired, appropriately, in a V-neck and light sweatshirt. His eyes take in my outfit, squint up at the sun. A dry smile plays about his lips. \"You think you'll be warm enough?\" he asks.\n\nAs Stanley Kowalski might have put it: \"Stelllaaaannn!\"\n\n Once at sea, I can only imagine, Skarsg\u00E5rd, 34, will form a trumpet with his hands and let forth a piercing ululation, summoning whales, which will arrive frolicking in Busby Berkeley formation, whereupon the Swede will strip shirtless and dive into the waves, breaking the surface several minutes later astride a newborn calf. I, meanwhile, will remain queasily deckbound, a homunculus sweating in my woolens.\n\n For the record, he's wearing a winter hat, too\u2014but it's one of those loose, light numbers that has replaced the baseball cap as de rigueur don't-recognize-me headwear for young actors. As disguises go, it doesn't really do the trick. Skarsg\u00E5rd's most striking and unusual characteristic is his height, something about as common in Hollywood's male actors as girth is in its female ones; even slimmed down for a recent role in von Trier's film Melancholia, he's an imposing figure at six feet four. The only thing keeping him from being recognized is that, well, he's not really that famous. Yet. At the moment, he's mostly known to viewers of HBO, where he first anchored the ensemble cast of Generation Kill, David Simon and Ed Burns's miniseries about the invasion of Iraq, and where he now plays True Blood's mighty Eric Northman.\n\n The character is a 1,000-year-old vampire who presides as the \"sheriff\" of a district in Louisiana. (One of the more amusing aspects of the show's universe is the notion that the undead are subject to the same ba\u00B1ing bureaucratic structures as the rest of us.) He's evolved from a relatively minor character in the show's first season to one that threatens to eclipse the nominal romantic leads.\n\n In no small part this is because women have gone nuts for the particular brand of Scandinavian good looks Skarsg\u00E5rd brings to the party. Used to be, the sexuality that kept female viewers damp-palmed for vampire stories was at least marginally subtextual. Now\u2014whether in True Blood or Twilight\u2014it's not only front and center but somehow requiring of \"teams\" rooting for one creature or another to successfully plant his teeth in the fetching young heroine. (Dracula never suffered the indignity of I'M ON TEAM VLAD T-shirts.) In the fictional town of Bon Temps, Team Eric has been ascendant for several seasons now\u2014and is likely to stay so when season four begins, June 26, revealing an entirely new and more vulnerable side of Northman's character.\n\n Similarly, a new chapter of Skarsg\u00E5rd's career is about to begin with a run of wildly disparate films: First comes Melancholia, set to premiere in Cannes, in which he performs for the first time on-camera alongside his father; then, in September, a remake of the classic Sam Peckinpah movie Straw Dogs; and finally there's next year's board-game-based blockbuster Battleship, already legendary, whatever its eventual virtues, as emblematic of the dearth of Hollywood imagination.\n\n For now, though, he can still slip unnoticed and unmolested into the line of tourists and families waiting to board the stately MV Two Harbors. Soon we're chugging past the regal hulk of the Queen Mary in its permanent Long Beach dock and out into calm, glassy seas. Even before he first went whale-watching off Monterey and started the campaign that so irks his dad, Skarsg\u00E5rd was obsessed with whales, forcing his parents to read to him from a picture book filled with them every night as a boy. What he responds to, he says, is what everybody responds to: the combination of grandeur and grace. \"They're the size of three buses, and yet they move with such calm confidence,\" he says.\n\n The water, too, is Skarsg\u00E5rd's element; he grew up on and around the Baltic Sea, ferrying through the Stockholm archipelago, vacationing at the family's spartan compound on \u00D6land, off Sweden's southeastern coast. \"I miss it,\" he says as we pick up speed, wind whipping across the deck. \"Here, I live a few miles from the ocean\"\u2014in the Hollywood Hills\u2014\"but I'll wake up and think, 'Fuck, I haven't seen it for three weeks.' \"\n\n Stature aside, Skarsg\u00E5rd may look like any number of other young Hollywood hotshots, and his accent is convincing enough that Battleship director Peter Berg didn't realize he was foreign until after he'd hired him and they'd had lunch. (\"I guess I'm not that observant,\" Berg says, when asked what he made of that last name with its funny little circle over the a.) But Skarsg\u00E5rd remains defiantly, definitively a Swede. He spends all his available vacation time back in Sweden and maintains a bemused regard for the differences between Los Angeles and what he considers home.\n\n \"You walk into the coffee shop, and the girl asks how your day is. When I first moved here, I loved that. I know it's shallow and superficial and she doesn't give a fuck about my day, but I still like it,\" he says. Sweden, by contrast, is more reserved. \"It's difficult to get to know a Swede. But once you do, you're in,\" he says. And there's a stronger sense of boundaries. \"You're never going to see a television show The Skarsg\u00E5rds.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Shame. It would be a fascinating show to watch. The Skarsg\u00E5rd family\u2014Alexander has five younger brothers and a younger sister\u2014is based in Sdermalm, the island neighborhood in Stockholm long known as a home for writers, artists, and other bohemians. Imagine Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with more herring. Every day they observe what is known as the Roll Out, in which Stellan and whichever children are around escort the clan's 81-year-old matriarch, Gudrun, in her wheelchair to a hallowed old beer hall named Kvarnen that functions as fan headquarters for Hammarby, the local soccer team and one of Skarsg\u00E5rd's obsessions. Gudrun will have one beer and two shots of Fernet-Branca. (\"She's over food,\" Skarsg\u00E5rd says.) Later Stellan spends the rest of the afternoon cooking, his primary passion. The tribe gathers once again for dinner and wine.\n\n To place this most un-Hollywood idyll in context, it's important to understand exactly how famous Stellan Skarsg\u00E5rd is in his home country: Think George Clooney\u2014if George Clooney was the only internationally famous actor in an entire country with a tradition of revering actors.\n\n What that meant for Stellan's eldest son is that, even in civilized Sweden, Alexander grew up constantly aware of being in the public eye. As a tween, he dabbled in acting himself, most notably in a film called Hunden Som Log (or \"The Dog That Smiled\"), but was freaked out by the girls soon lining up outside the house and quit. He never expected to act again.\n\n Both father and son repeat the same vignette from Alexander's childhood\u2014clearly a piece of family folklore. \"He was always full of energy,\" says Stellan. \"When we'd walk down the street, he would run ahead to the curb\u2014where he knew to stop\u2014and then run back to me. Then to the curb, then back. Shorter and shorter distances until I caught up.\"\n\n The image\u2014son venturing out into the world, staying just this side of danger and then darting back, while father ambles watchfully behind\u2014is as good as any to sum up their relationship. There's an old joke that has the rebellious sons of circus performers running off to join an accounting firm; likewise, the son of a bohemian actor might find himself enlisting in the Swedish Royal Navy's antiterrorist division.\n\n True, military service was nominally compulsory in Sweden at the time, but it was also easily avoided with any number of excuses. (None of Skarsg\u00E5rd's brothers served, nor did their father: \"I was busy smoking pot,\" Stellan says. \"It seemed terribly inconvenient.\") It is more common to do one's duty in an office somewhere, rather than as a member of the elite S\u00E4kJakt unit\u2014the name roughly translates to \"protect and hunt\"\u2014responsible for patrolling the vast archipelago outside Stockholm for various forms of sabotage.\n\n Skarsg\u00E5rd is the first to poke fun at the notion of the Swedish military, which saw its last serious action around the time of the Northern War, 300 years ago, but it was an important challenge for him. \"It was my way of going off into the unknown,\" he says. \"I didn't want to just be somebody's son.\"\n\n And he did have one action-packed night, in which he and the squadron he was commanding were asked to investigate a false alarm involving someone slipping from a small submarine onto one of the archipelago's thousands of uninhabited islands. \"I'd been playing war for fifteen months, and now we were carrying live ammunition,\" he says. There was no enemy to be found on that little island, but Skarsg\u00E5rd was exhilarated nonetheless. Whatever test he had needed to set for himself in the military, he'd passed.\n\n \"We just climbed back into the little boat, nobody saying anything, and headed north under the stars,\" he says.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Our sea is equally silent, an unbroken, notably whaleless, gray expanse. Children are growing listless and impatient, even as we pass a large buoy crowded with sea lions. The Two Harbors comes into sight of an oil rig. \"Look, a person!\" a little girl cries as a tiny figure appears on the rig. I find it impossible not to think of Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves, in which Stellan Skarsg\u00E5rd's character is paralyzed in a gruesome offshore-drilling accident. Alexander says he didn't hesitate when von Trier offered him a role alongside his father in Melancholia. \"I told my agents, 'I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe I'll be getting coffee. But I'm taking this,' \" he says. In the event, he plays a groom marrying Kirsten Dunst, at a wedding that takes place while a massive planet hurtles on a collision course toward Earth. Von Trier has called it the first of his films to have a sad ending, something that should instill deep foreboding in anybody who's seen his other laughfests. Stellan plays his son's best man.\n\n Indeed, to whatever degree The Skarsg\u00E5rds is an Oedipal drama, it's one remarkably free of neurosis. \"I don't think I came to acting to compete with my father. But, you know, he wasn't around as much as normal dads, and seeing his passion...Maybe it was a way to get his attention,\" Skarsg\u00E5rd says with a shrug. He grins, exhibiting a surprisingly goofy overbite that brings to mind his tiny but memorable role as a male model in Zoolander. \"I mean, if anything, we're trying to take care of him. He's over the hill.\"\n\n As for Stellan, he chuckles. \"Of course I'm threatened,\" he says of his sons. \"They're younger, they're better-looking, and they're all trying to kill me.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n With some satisfaction, I notice Skarsg\u00E5rd shivering a bit as we stand on the front deck of our boat. Then I realize he's sticking to the shade offered by the boat's cabin. \"I play a vampire,\" he shrugs. You can cover a tan with makeup, but it tends to make the skin look gray in HD.\n\n In True Blood's ever expanding ensemble of fairies, werewolves, shape-shifters, telepaths, werecats, telefairies, vamp-shifters, and God knows what else, his Eric has become a solid center\u2014the only character to display that essential quality shared by great HBO antiheroes past (think Tony Soprano or Omar Little or Al Swearengen): genuine unpredictability. Skarsg\u00E5rd's minutely calibrated deadpan somehow makes him the show's funniest, most cerebral, and most ferally frightening personage. \"He does this thing with his eyes,\" says creator and show-runner Alan Ball. \"It's like they become slightly unfocused and all of a sudden they're mirrors to this ancient, 1,000-year-old soul.\" Indeed what Eric is, his relative humanity, may be the only moral mystery to be found amidst all the steamy, gothic froth.\n\n Not that Skarsg\u00E5rd emerges suds-free. Those rooting for Eric in the increasingly explicit love-blood triangle he shares with Anna Paquin's Sookie Stackhouse and Stephen Moyer's Bill Compton are surely aware of the extra frisson provided by Paquin and Moyer's real-life marriage. Does it also mean on-set awkwardness?\n\n \"It's really clear to Steve and to everybody else what the deal is\u2014which is that Anna is like a sister to me,\" Skarsg\u00E5rd says. \"Those love scenes take quite a bit of acting, actually. A lot of acting.\"\n\n In the original Straw Dogs, Skarsg\u00E5rd's character, Charlie Venner, was a largely one-dimensional menace\u2014a galoot driven by simple lust for the nubile local girl, Amy, who'd moved back to their rural English town with her mathematician husband. In the remake, which is transplanted to Mississippi, Venner, says director Rod Lurie, is something more complicated\u2014an ex\u2013football star gone to seed. \"He was the king of the town, ten years ago,\" Skarsg\u00E5rd says. \"And now he's got nothing.\"\n\n Lurie says, \"Before we even started, Alex told me he had to play it as a kind of love story. And you should see women react to him on-screen. Their mouths hang open.\"\n\n All of which is sure to complicate audience reaction to the film's most controversial scene, in which Venner rapes Amy, who is played in the remake by Kate Bosworth. Tabloid followers will be aware of the widely reported news that Skarsg\u00E5rd and Bosworth are romantically involved. (When asked about the relationship, he shuts down, smile disappearing, with a completeness and efficiency that could only come from growing up in the public eye. \"My father always kept the family out of the press,\" he says later, almost apologetic.)\n\n It was, by all accounts, a brutal scene to film, taking place over two days.\"In the beginning, Kate would be crying after every take and Alex would try to comfort her,\" says Lurie. \"By the end, everybody got really raw.\"\n\n When the film was in postproduction, Skarsg\u00E5rd brought his father for a visit to the editing room at Sony studios, and they watched the scene as it was being cut together. \"They seemed more like best friends than father and son,\" says Lurie. At the end, Stellan stood up and spoke those words every boy longs to hear. Says Lurie, \"He proclaimed it 'the best rape ever filmed.' \"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n \"Well, we didn't see any whales today,\" the deflated guide of the Two Harbors says over the loudspeaker, as the Queen Mary once again passes to port. She tries to muster some cheer: \"We did see some dolphins and sea lions and some great bird activity!\"\n\n That hopeful euphemism does nothing to rouse the kids flopped sullenly throughout the cabin or appease their pissed-off parents, but it makes Skarsg\u00E5rd spontaneously cackle. \"That's great! 'Bird activity.' Look,\" he points at a seagull. \"More bird activity!\"\n\n We come about and head back toward Los Angeles. \"Hollywood can be like kids playing marbles on the schoolyard,\" he says. \"Everybody wants the shiny marble until one kid says he doesn't. Then nobody will touch it. So it's important that I make good decisions now. \"\n\n That doesn't mean he has trouble ricocheting from the highbrow world of von Trier to the soapier True Blood; nor way beyond, to the green-screen-and-explosion bonanza that Battleship promises to be. (You were expecting Strindberg's take on a board game?) \"If you're an actor in Sweden, you do drama, you do comedy, you do action, you do film and live theater. You do whatever there is,\" Skarsg\u00E5rd says. \"Vanity is death to an actor.\" Ball describes him as \"the least actorly actor I've ever met.\"\n\n \"The nice thing is that as long as I'm doing this TV show, I've got fuck-you money,\" Skarsg\u00E5rd says. \"So I can say no to things. I never want to be in a position where I can't defend why I said yes.\"\n\n And sometimes yes can just be about enjoying all that youth and fame and beauty have to offer. Battleship's director, Peter Berg, tells a story about the two men flying in a windowless twin turboprop plane to visit the nuclear-powered carrier USS Ronald Reagan. \"We're sitting backwards in this pitch-black chamber, coming in at 220 knots, and then we hit the deck of the carrier and go to zero in, like, a second,\" the director says. The door opened, and Berg was blinded by the flood of sunlight as sailors pulled him out. He straightened up and was suddenly off his feet again; Skarsg\u00E5rd had swept him up and was shaking him, spinning around, on the deck of a ship in the middle of the vast ocean. \"This is awesome!\" the actor was screaming. \"This is fucking awesome!\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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