Dave Davies

Trust the director, trust the process.

All right.

Stellan Skarsgård, thank you so much for speaking with us.

This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies.

Our guest today, Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, has had a long and interesting career, which only seems to get more interesting with age.

Now in his 70s, he's just earned a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the widely acclaimed film Sentimental Value from the Danish-Norwegian director Joakim Trier.

This surge in Skarsgård's fortunes comes four years after he suffered a stroke, which left him struggling to memorize his lines.

He found a workaround, which we'll talk about, and that enabled him to continue to play roles he'd begun in the science fiction movie series Dune and the Star Wars spinoff TV series Andor, as well as the film Sentimental Value.

Skarsgård began acting as a teenager and has appeared in more than 100 movies, from independent European films like Breaking the Waves and Melancholia, to commercial Hollywood fare such as The Hunt for Red October, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Mamma Mia.

He's also found time to raise eight children from two marriages.

Five of those kids are also professional actors.

The best known in the United States are his sons Alexander and Bill.

Skarsgård will find out if he's an Oscar winner at the awards ceremony March 15th.

He spoke to me last week from a studio in London.

Stellan Skarsgard, welcome to Fresh Air.

Thank you very much.

In this film, Sentimental Value, you play Gustav Borg.

He's a famous director, and it's about his family relationship.

He's the target of a lot of anger from one of his daughters because she says he wasn't around.