Alexander Skarsgård seems unusually calm considering the week he’s having. It’s a few days before he makes his hosting debut on “Saturday Night Live.” He flew to New York City straight from the Sundance Film Festival, where he premiered two films, “The Moment” and “Wicker,” and immediately jumped into a whirlwind of sketch pitches.
“I went basically straight from the airport to 30 Rock,” Skarsgård says, speaking over Zoom. He’s presumably in his NYC hotel room but his background is blurred, as fitting a representation of his constant motion as anything. He’s casually dressed in a white T-shirt and seems completely at peace — almost as if he has nowhere else to be.
“It was surreal to fly through the winter storm, to land and go straight to meet Lorne Michaels and get started,” he adds. “It’s complete chaos, but what an experience.”
His demeanor is anything but chaotic. He’s measured and open as he discusses “Pillion,” a complexly wrought debut feature from British filmmaker Harry Lighton opening Friday, and “The Moment,” an oddball mockumentary about Charli XCX’s de-brat-ification, now in theaters. It might be professional generosity. Or it could be that Skarsgård is enjoying the fact that he himself is having a moment.
“People think there’s this invisible ladder and you have to get to the next rung of the ladder,” he says. “It’s easy to forget to check in with yourself and ask, ‘Well, what do I want to do?’ You can get swept away. I’m trying to get down the ladder to the ground.”
Skarsgård, 49, has built a thriving career since breaking out in HBO series “True Blood” in 2008, including compelling, but somehow not quite star-making turns in Robert Eggers’ “The Northman” and Brandon Cronenberg’s “Infinity Pool.” He comes from a family of revered actors — current Oscar nominee Stellan Skarsgård is his father and he is the eldest of eight siblings, including Bill Skarsgård, best known as the evil clown Pennywise from “It” — and none of them seem particularly concerned with a requisite career trajectory. Over the years, Alexander has dabbled in film and TV, in comedy, drama and horror. He can veer from hilarious (see his “SNL” opening monologue) to hardened and dangerous, like on “Big Little Lies.” But right now his work is colliding in a particularly exciting chapter.
At the forefront is “Pillion,” a provocatively daring film that eschews shock value for real emotion. The premise feels less nuanced than the resulting film: An introverted young man named Colin (Harry Melling) finds himself entwined in a loving but submissive relationship with a mysterious, leather-clad motorcycle gang member named Ray (Skarsgård). Skarsgård laughingly calls it a “kinky gay biker rom-com” and it is, but it’s also an endearing coming-of-age story. The film sensitively and disarmingly refuses to other the subculture at its core — a clever way of making the particular feel universal.
“Sometimes you can find a little nugget,” Skarsgård says of the script, which came to him in an email, not quite a formal offer. “A lot of them are stuff you might not gravitate towards. And this could have easily been lost amid a bunch of other emails.”
Skarsgård was intrigued by the logline, but also because the story wasn’t something he’d really seen onscreen before. “I thought it would be more hardcore and in your face and harsh,” Skarsgård says. “I was really surprised when I started reading it. It has some orgies in the woods and all that. But there was a tenderness to it and a levity and humor. I was really swept away.”
He knew immediately that he wanted to talk to writer-director Lighton, who imagined Skarsgård in the role after watching his guest run on “Succession.”
“I think one of the reasons he was so keen is he’s someone who has a sense of mischief and fun,” Lighton says, speaking separately over Zoom from London. “He leads with what he finds interesting rather than necessarily a big perspective on a career — or what a career should be.”
Skarsgård didn’t care that it was a small film. These days, he doesn’t work in pursuit of money.
“I can afford to say no to movies I don’t respond to, even if it’s a big paycheck attached,” he says with an amiable shrug. “That has not been the case for most of my career, so I don’t want to waste that opportunity because it might not last forever. Creatively I want to make the most out of it and take jobs with people I’m excited to work with on characters I’m excited to explore and let that drive my decisions.”
Being part of a low-budget film came with some delays as “Pillion” still needed to be financed when the actor accepted the role. A year went by between the call with Lighton and production, and in the months prior to filming “Pillion,” Skarsgård flew to Toronto to shoot the first season of an adaptation of author Martha Wells’ sci-fi series “The Murderbot Diaries.” He and Melling never spoke before getting started, which was by design for them both. The first day they met was one week into production in the summer of 2024. Lighton brought the actors into a rehearsal for a wrestling scene, where Colin gamely attempts to pin the much stronger Ray before they have sex for the first time.
“We literally shook hands and jumped on top of each other,” Melling, 36, says, speaking from London over Zoom. “From then on, it was like, ‘OK, great, here we go.’”
“It was quite an exciting introduction to someone,” Skarsgård remembers. “We didn’t avoid speaking beforehand. If he had reached out and wanted to talk I would have been more than happy to. But I didn’t feel the need to. I thought, ‘Let’s just see what happens once we’re in front of the camera.’”
Melling felt the same. “These characters don’t know much about each other when they first meet, so it was lovely that we were both finding it in the space on set,” he says. “And, selfishly, it helped me a lot because my character is always second-guessing Ray’s instincts. I didn’t know what Alex was going to do next.”
Unlike Melling, who spent time with the Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club, a British group that appears in the film, Skarsgård didn’t have time in his schedule for much real-world research before shooting. He says he repeatedly watched Kenneth Anger’s experimental 1963 film “Scorpio Rising” for inspiration. And he already had a motorcycle license, although he doesn’t currently have a bike. But once in England, he was eager to learn from the Gay Bikers Motorcycle Club.
“They were extraordinarily generous and inviting, bringing both myself and Harry into their world,” he says. “The fact that they also inhabited the movie was tremendously important to us. When it came to the set pieces we could ask, ‘What’s real? What’s not real? Which type of lube would we use in this orgy?’ They brought their own dildos and their own props.”
Ray initiates Colin into BDSM (a sexual practice often involving relationship dominance and submission, as well as bondage and discipline), which allows Colin to find his confidence. The sex scenes, which do indeed include an orgy in the woods, aren’t there to provoke. There is an emotional or narrative reason for each encounter, choreographed by intimacy coordinator Robbie Taylor Hunt.
It’s not just, ‘Oh, a wild, crazy, gay orgy in the woods,’” says Skarsgård. “There’s so much psychologically going on. I was excited about them because I often find sex scenes to feel gratuitous. Sometimes they’re in the movie just because they want to show some skin but often there’s no tension during a sex scene. The thrilling bit is the build-up before. Harry constructed these scenes so they propel the story forward. Each scene has huge significance to Colin’s character.”
Colin and Ray’s first sexual encounter sees Ray leading Colin into a dark alleyway on Christmas night. Things get intimate, even though Colin’s skills are lacking. The episode ends with a thrilled Colin licking Ray’s boot. The actors were careful to ensure that Colin seemed game, rather than forced — an important aspect of a BDSM relationship. Overall, Lighton sought to be nuanced in his portrayal of the couple.
“I definitely was very aware that I didn’t want to make a mockery of those sexual practices,” Lighton says. “I wanted to give them sincerity and emotional weight as well as lightness and humor, and the actors shared that.”
Although “Pillion” felt creatively freeing for him, Skarsgård doesn’t have one particular way of working. In “The Northman,” for instance, each shot was specifically designed by director Eggers and there was no room for in-the-moment reaction or improvisation. He likes rehearsing, although he prefers not to fully commit to something until he’s in front of the camera. “Pillion” was the opposite end of the spectrum to “The Northman,” where the only moments that were discussed in advance were the sex scenes.
“It was so thrilling having not explored or talked about the scenes with Melling,” Skarsgård says. “I would go into a scene and even though my character was the dominant one I never knew exactly how he was going to react. That gave me a lot to play with. The days on set were filled with surprises and scenes would go in very different directions from the way I anticipated.”
“Anything was possible,” Melling adds. He points to a scene where Ray makes a bad joke about pizza as he and Colin eat dinner on the sofa. Originally, there were no scripted lines. “It was a lovely instinct that Alex had to show Ray making an effort.”
He adds, “Alex is the perfect scene partner. He changes stuff up. He adds different flavors to the scenes. He gave me all of the impulses from which to respond. It could have been a very different movie with someone else.”
After Skarsgård finished the five-week shoot, which he describes as “incredibly exhilarating,” he flew almost immediately to Budapest to film “Wicker,” another unusual love story set in an almost abstract medieval village co-starring Olivia Colman. In early January 2025, Charli XCX and video director Aidan Zamiri sent the actor the script for “The Moment,” which follows the pop star as she grapples with the overwhelming pressure of fame. Skarsgård plays egocentric concert director Johannes Godwin, who has been hired to film Charli’s “Brat” show and who has some dominating ideas. He absolutely relished the comedic turn.
“It was such a delicious character,” Skarsgård says. “And I thought Charli XCX was awesome. We have mutual friends, because she’s worked a lot with Swedish artists like Robyn and Yung Lean, but I’d never met her. I know everyone says, ‘Yes, I was fan of her music.’ But I could prove it. She was my No. 2 most-played artist on Spotify Wrapped in 2024.”
He tries to find the proof on his phone and fails. “I didn’t tell Charli or Aidan about this Spotify thing until after the shoot,” he admits. “I knew it would get weird. But at the wrap I was like, ‘By the way, I’m a legit, genuine fan’ and I showed it to them.”
Although his level of fame isn’t quite the same as what’s portrayed around Charli in the film, Skarsgård tapped into the thematic ideas in “The Moment.”
“How do you navigate through your career once you’ve had that moment when you’re a pop-culture phenomenon?” he says. “How do you sustain that and how do you stay true to your own creative vision? Or how much are you allowing yourself to be manipulated by others?”
Skarsgård isn’t particularly concerned about how he’s perceived, both by the industry and by his fans. His red-carpet ensembles showcase a whimsical sense of fun, rather than an obsession with image. When told how much the internet loves his public appearances, like at the London Film Festival premiere of “Pillion” and on British talk show “Lorraine,” he shrugs and says he never Googles himself or looks at himself online. “I try to have fun in the moment and do whatever inspires me,” he says. “Some people might hate it. I don’t know.”
That irreverence is something Lighton sensed from their first conversation. “He’s very thoughtful and considered in his work,” the filmmaker says. “It’s not like he’s a joker who doesn’t take it seriously. He really does take it seriously. But I found him a real delight to work with. In quite a cheeky way, he takes a torch to ideas of masculinity and what it means to be a leading man.”
Both Melling and Lighton profess gratitude that a star of Skarsgård’s profile wanted to be part of “Pillion.” But the actor says it’s he who should be grateful.
“I consider myself very lucky because it was one of the greatest experiences,” Skarsgård says. “It was a low-budget movie that to some people may be a bit risqué and it’s by a first-time filmmaker. I get that it’s not necessarily a slam dunk from the industry’s point of view. But it was tremendously exciting.”
As the call wraps up, Skarsgård prepares to leap back into a flurry of skit rehearsals (his father Stellan ended up making a surprise appearance in a sketch skewering Swedish cinema) and then onward to the premiere of “Pillion.” He has a month off before the production of the second season of “Murderbot,” which he’ll spend back home in Stockholm, where he relocated from New York City three years ago. His dad and siblings live within blocks of him in Södermalm.
“It’s a wonderful contrast to the chaos of when I’m away working,” he says. “This week is wild and exciting. But to then get on the plane and fly back to Stockholm means a lot to me. I’ve really enjoyed having that clean break between work and private life.”
For now, though, he’s still in the fray. And if this is indeed Skarsgård’s moment, it’s clear he’s happy to take it all in and to continue making choices that seem right to him.
The post Alexander Skarsgård calls his latest a ‘kinky gay biker rom-com.’ It’s also the love story of the season appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
