Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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.
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Chapter 2: What insights does Stellan Skarsgård share about playing nuanced characters?
He's the target of a lot of anger from one of his daughters because she says he wasn't around. Being in the movie business can mean you're away a lot, and this daughter is also a successful actress herself. There's an obvious parallel here to your own life. I mean, you're in the movie business, and a lot of your children are actors.
I know you've been asked this a lot, but to what extent when you read this script, did you identify with this character?
Not at all. He's from a different generation. He's a different kind of father than I am. Of course, the conflict between working as an artist and combining that with a personal life is difficult. And those problems I have. But that goes for every artist. But I didn't think I had anything to do with the role at all. So I did the entire film as if it was a stranger I was doing.
But then my second son, Gustav, said to me, after having seen the film that he liked very much, that he said to me, do you recognize yourself? And I went, no. And he said, look again. And even if I was at home basically eight months of 12, I only worked four months a year since 1989. If I was at home eight months a year, I wasn't enough home for him. So I started to thinking about it.
What became clear to me is, I mean, I have eight children. So I have eight different needs. Some children need me a lot and some don't need me at all. So you can't get it right as a parent.
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Chapter 3: How did a stroke affect Stellan Skarsgård's acting career?
I read that the director, Joachim Trier, you talked about this, I guess, a year before you started shooting. And he kind of crafted the script for you. Is this true?
Yeah, he wrote it for me. Not as a service to me, but he was thinking of me when he was writing it. He and the writer Eskel Fugt. He says that the role was such a bad guy that he needed someone nice to do it. So it was a flattering way of putting it.
Yeah. Is he a bad guy, Gustav, your character?
I don't believe in bad guys.
No, no.
I mean, the monster that I did in Dune was a bad guy. You might say that. But in like human beings, we have problems because they are nuanced, real humans. And they're flawed. They're sad and they're comic and they're everything.
Right. And the gulf between Gustav and his daughter is bridged as the movie eventually reaches its climax. It's quite well done. You know, I don't have a clip to play from the film. For an American audience, a lot of the film is not in English. But the other thing that I realized when I was looking for audio was that if you listen to audio versions of dialogue in this film –
There are maybe longer pauses than usual and it occurred to me when I watched the film for the second time that a lot of the acting here is, you know, you're responding with your face and your eyes to what other actors are saying. Is this a Joachim Trier technique?
It's a human trait. I mean it's a wonderful thing because normally what is asked of the actor is to act within the line, to make the line one way or make the line another way because in the line is all the information that is given to the audience and that's not accurate. That's not good.
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Chapter 4: What parenting lessons does Stellan Skarsgård offer regarding his children in the film industry?
I wanted to talk about this stroke that you had that you suffered I guess in 2022, right? If you're comfortable, could you just tell us what happened when this occurred?
Well, I just got a stroke. I mean, my wife sort of noticed something on me, and my son, who was a doctor, he said that you should go to the hospital. And it was a stroke. It was a rather mild stroke. I lost some muscles in my right side of my body, and I lost some part of my brain.
I have a bigger problem if I'm presenting a long thought chain, like if I'm having a political discussion or anything. I mean, I lose my bearing in the middle of it and just go quiet. But other than that, maybe some balance problems, but other than that, I was fine.
Well, of course, the problem, as I understand it, that you faced with your career was that you couldn't really learn lines as you did before. And you found a way to kind of work around this. Tell us what you did, how you got there.
Well, the thing is I've always had difficulties learning lines in a way if I didn't sort of have them tailored to my feelings. But the way I totally… Forgot lines immediately now. And I discovered that I sort of was lying in bed in a hospital and I was trying to test myself if I could remember the lines.
And I sort of took a book and I read something and I closed the book and I didn't remember it. So I called from the hospital. I made a call to Tony Gilroy, who was the showrunner and writer of Andor. I was in the middle of doing them. I had done the first episodes and I hadn't done the second season. And I also owed Denise Villeneuve, who was going to do Dune II.
a phone call and I talked to them and I said I cannot remember anything any lines and they said don't worry we'll fix it and they said take it easy come in and do what you need to and I did. And there's a lot of actors that are actually using this technique, which is an earpiece and a prompter. But I found it rather difficult if you wanted to be precise in terms of rhythm. Yeah, I think.
And of the rhythm of the scene. And to me, rhythm is very important because you use it as a tool, the way, the rhythm you make in the scene. And I had to... I had to have the guy, the prompter, put his lines on top of my fellow actor.
So just so we understand this, you have a little earpiece, right? And it's not a recording of the lines. It's a live prompter who is saying these lines as you're in the scene, often speaking at the same time as your fellow actors.
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Chapter 5: What unique improvisation experiences did Stellan Skarsgård have with Robin Williams?
But I've done theater before and I've done sort of amateur theater and I've done also professional theater before I did that.
Okay. So what did being famous at 16 – I assume this meant people would recognize you on the street and that kind of thing. What effect did that have on you in your life?
Well, you can say that child actors, they can either succumb to the pressure and the sort of loss of anonymity can turn out really bad. Or you can survive it and it turns out pretty well. And I had very, very thoughtful and brilliant parents who sort of made sure that my head didn't get too big and that I was grounded as a person.
Do you remember how they did that?
Well, they pointed out to me how different I was from my persona, my public persona. And the important thing is don't get that difference between your public persona and yourself too big because that's when it happens, when it goes wrong.
Right. I wanted to talk about a film that I gather was kind of a breakthrough project for you. 1996, the film is Breaking the Waves. It was your first film with the Danish director Lars von Trier, right? And you star with a very young Emily Watson. I think this was her first film. A lot of sex in this movie, which was interesting. I mean, you were a little older than her.
You were kind of in the mid-40s. She was late 20s. Anyway, I want to play a clip here. You play a man who works on an oil rig off the coast of Scotland and she plays a young woman in a very conservative coastal town near the rig. And the two of you fall in love, get married, have an active and very actively portrayed sex life in the film.
And then your character, Jan, is injured in an accident and paralyzed from the neck down. Bess, your now wife, is devoted to you. And in this scene, she is at your bedside and you make a request of her. Let's listen.
Love is a mighty power, isn't it? If I die, it will be because love cannot keep me alive. I can hardly remember what it's like to make love. And if I forget that, then I'll die. Remember when I phoned you from the rake and we made love without being together? Do you want me to talk to you like that again? I'd love to. Beth, I want you to find a man to make love to.
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Chapter 6: How does Stellan Skarsgård view the concept of 'bad guys' in acting?
This was the film set in Boston, written by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And I wanted to play a clip here. The story people will remember is about these young friends in Boston. who are working class guys. They're kind of brawlers. They like to drink at bars. But one of them, the Matt Damon character, is a janitor in a college and is also a savant, brilliant at math and whatever.
You, Stellan Skarsgård, play a math professor who want to get this brilliant young man to work with you. But he's in jail because he got into a fight and punched a police officer. And you've gotten the court to agree to release him to study math, provided he sees a therapist.
So in this scene we're going to hear, you have come to a psychiatrist, played by Robin Williams, who you have a history with, to see if he will agree to see the young man. And the psychiatrist is reluctant, and he speaks first. Let's listen.
I've got a full schedule. I'm very busy. This boy is incredible. I've never seen anything like him. What makes him so incredible, Jerry? Ever heard of Ramana, John? Yeah. It's a man. He lived over a hundred years ago. He was Indian. And he lived in this tiny hut somewhere in India. He had no formal education. He had no access to any scientific work. But he came across this old math mix.
And from this simple text, he was able to extrapolate theories that had baffled mathematicians for years. Continued fractions. He wrote it with a... Well, he mailed it to Hardy. Yeah. And Hardy immediately recognized the brilliance of his work and brought him over to England. And then they worked together for years, creating some of the most exciting math theory ever done.
This Romano John, his genius was unparalleled, Sean. This boy is just like that. But he's a bit defensive. And I need someone who can get through to him. Like me? Yeah, like you. Why? Well, because you have the same kind of background. What background? Oh, you're from the same neighborhood. He's from Southie? Yeah. Poor ingenious from Southie. How many shrinks you go to before me? Five.
Let me guess. Barry. Yeah. Henry. Yeah. Not Rick. Sean, please. Just meet with him once a week, please.
And that's our guest, Stellan Skarsgård and Robin Williams in the film Good Will Hunting. What was it like working with Robin Williams on this set?
It was fantastic. I mean, he was a very nice man and a very gentle man. But he also, he had like three brains going on at the same time, wildly. And he was very funny. And he was improvising. He improvised every scene we had to do some extra takes because he had to get his versions out of his system. But the improvisation was also good for us all. I mean, you had to follow him wherever he went.
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Chapter 7: What techniques does Stellan Skarsgård use to memorize lines after his stroke?
You know, the Soviet system or any authoritarian system is based on loyalty and lies to else. And if you're asked out of loyalty to the power to present lies, you will sort of undermine everything. And everybody in the system were lying about everything in the nuclear reactor system because facts didn't count.
They were used to lying in all aspects of life, right?
Yeah. And it was also important to not rock the boat, not draw attention from your superiors, and not sort of be controversial in any way. Sit still in the boat. But... When he discovers the unfathomable size of this catastrophe, he gradually comes to his senses and realizes that we've made this ourselves. And that's an interesting character to play.
And then, of course, he realizes eventually that he'll die as well. But to him, the big revelation is not that he's going to die. It's that the system that he has been serving all his life is flawed.
Right. And there are many, many other reactors with the same flaws that led to this disaster. And nobody wants to deal with that because they're not telling each other the truth.
Right.
We are speaking with Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgard. He's up for the Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards ceremony March 15th. We'll talk more after this break. This is Fresh Air. You know, you've done a lot of independent films, but plenty of commercial work and often playing characters that are powerful, sometimes evil.
And I want to just you just tell us a little bit about the role in Dune, the science fiction series in which you play a galactic bad guy, Baron Harkonnen. I could play a clip, but the audio wouldn't do it justice because what's amazing is what you look like. You want to describe your character and what it took to get ready every day?
Well, it took eight hours of makeup. Eight hours? Wow. Eight hours. It is a lot of prosthetics. I mean, I added 40 kilos of foam to my weight. I'm playing this character. fat monster, Harkonnen, and he's an emperor and he has one job in the film, and that is to be the sort of the very epitome of evil. And he is.
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