The actor and the new face of Valentino Vendetta opens up about his new film, working with Dakota Johnson, and True Blood
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Alexander Skarsgård played a vampire in True Blood, a human monster in Big Little Lies , and a robot in Murderbot. But his role as a sentient basket husband in Wicker is shaping up to be his most beloved yet. With the film hitting theaters this month, you might also see Skarsgård starring in a campaign for Valentino Vendetta, a new perfume and cologne, alongside Dakota Johnson. Fans have been clamoring for over a decade to see the two on screen together, and the result, while not a full-length movie, is as sultry and delightful as you’d expect.
Ahead, we caught up with the actor to learn why he loves Vendetta’s scent, what it was like finally working with Johnson, and his one wish for Wicker fans everywhere.
We met in New York around 2015 or 2016, through lots of mutual friends. I adore Dakota, and we've kind of circled a couple of projects together, but nothing has ever really come to fruition. But I've always wanted to work with her, so I was really excited when this came up. And it was also kind of great that we knew each other because it's a very short story we're telling in a nonlinear way, but in a very short amount of time, and it's nonverbal. So to already come into it knowing each other, the chemistry was already there in a way. There was no getting-to-know-each-other phase. We could just like jump in and get started.
I was a bit surprised. I loved and was surprised by the freshness. When you first smell it, it has ginger tones that are kind of intense, and then it evolves into something a bit more earthy, kind of cinnamony. It hits you, then evolves, which I think is really appealing to me. I love how bold it is. It's like a statement. It's not super subtle. It makes a statement when someone walks into the room wearing it, and I think that's interesting.
The character who would need it the most is probably Amleth, a character I played in a movie called The Northman, because he was a Viking berserker who hadn't taken a shower in three weeks. So I would have given him a good spray of Vendetta. But in terms of personality, maybe Eric Northman from True Blood, because there's a mischievous quality to it, and a self-confidence to it, and an assertiveness that I think kind of aligns with that character.
I read it after, not before. It depends on the project, on talking to the writers of the screenplay, and on how much it has departed from the original story. So in this case, I felt like I wanted to focus on Alex's and Eleanor's version of it, and then when we wrapped it, because I was curious to read it, I read it after we ran.
It's very, very great—it's great. It's phenomenal. Obviously, the same reaction I had when I read the script. It was so sweet and funny and sexy and said a lot about our society, but without being didactic or preachy. It was done with a very light touch, which I thought kind of spoke to my kind of aesthetic of how to tell a story in a very kind of irreverent way.
Yep, smelled of wicker! Because it's actually made out of wicker. The suit was made by Wētā Workshop in New Zealand, the company that made all the characters for The Lord of the Rings. It is, you know, the best in the world, and it is very old-school. It's all practical. They wanted to do it fo…