Alexander Skarsgård’s lifelong obsession with ‘Tootsie’: “I wanted to watch that over and over”
Alexander Skarsgård has two films coming up that sound… interesting to say the least.
The first is a movie with Olivia Colman called Wicker, which, rather like the 1973 classic The Wicker Man, involves the fashioning of a dummy man out of the material, only in this one it’s in order for Colman to have a pretend husband. And he’s also about to be seen in A24’s Pillion, a very full on gay sex biker gang movie featuring a former Harry Potter star. Standard.
Skarsgård isn’t one to shy away from a challenging role or two, however, and has even teased this week that the cut of Pillion that Cannes festival crowds have been seeing is much less explicit than one he would have put out. The Swede has already built up a varied and successful career over some 25 years now, going from Zoolander to HBO’s Iraq war drama Generation Kill to Emmy and Golden Globe nominations thanks to his work as a tech mogul in Succession.
In between, Skarsgård won a Primetime Emmy for playing an abusive husband in Nicole Kidman’s Big Little Lies and took a lead role in Robert Eggers’ Viking epic The Northman in 2022. This year, he’s been fronting Murderbot, Apple TV+’s futuristic show about a private security robot who has gone sentient and is trying to hide away amongst humans.
An action comedy, it attracted excellent reviews and was officially renewed for a second season by Apple back in June, with Skarsgård putting in a fine performance as the tortured humanoid.
When it comes to a character trying to blend in while not being exactly as they seem, perhaps Skarsgård was attracted to the role due to his love of the 1982 comedy Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman, telling Elle magazine: “I saw Tootsie with Jessica Lange when I was eight or nine. I remember feeling something in my stomach. I didn’t know what it was, but I wanted to watch that movie over and over again… My favourite movie of all time.”
The story of a New York-based actor who struggles so badly to get parts that he eventually goes for a role on a soap disguised as a woman, Tootsie was a big box office hit and was nominated for ten Oscars, winning Best Supporting Actress for Jessica Lange. Hoffman, who was also nominated for a Best Actor Oscar, was deeply affected by his role, realising that even with hours of make-up, he wasn’t described as a conventionally beautiful woman, and realising that he had avoided conversations with interesting women in the past simply because of his looks.
Skarsgård is certainly no stranger to the make-up chair; he was required to wear several prosthetics for the 2023 Brandon Cronenberg body horror Infinity Pool, alongside Mia Goth. It was another role that required the actor to completely commit to some pretty out there scenes, including a twisted, limb-merging orgy. But Skarsgård nevertheless seemed to enjoy the production and working with Goth especially, telling Buzzfeed: “It was an incredibly fun shoot. It really was amazing. And there were so many lovely, rich, juicy moments between our characters. I think the seduction scenes were really interesting to me.”
Aside from his upcoming two movies, Skarsgård is also filming a movie called The Moment with Rosanna Arquette about the perils of being a rising pop star and one called The Tiger about a gamekeeper under attack from a furry Siberian beast.
