Alexander Skarsgård and the ‘Pillion’ team on an unconventional Christmas romance: “Sub-dom rom-com”
In 2020, British author and film critic Adam Mars-Jones published his novella BOX HILL, which explores the unlikely BDSM relationship between wallflower Colin and a godlike, gorgeous leader of a motorbike club named Ray.
Originally set throughout Surrey summer in the 1970s, “almost like a picnic with some kinky sex in it” (as the author puts it), the film has been revamped five years later by first-time feature-film writer-director Harry Lighton, who bookends the story with the Christmas season. So less Call Me by Your Name and more Carol, but still entirely its own vehicle. Now titled Pillion, the movie arrives in UK theatres just in time for the holidays and stars Succession swooner Alexander Skarsgård wrapped in all leather no less – as Ray, the dom to Harry Melling’s sub.
“They’re calling it a sub-dom rom-com, right?”, Fleabag actor Anthony Welsh jokes. Welsh, who appears briefly but integrally in Pillion, says “[The film] felt unique, a quietly boundary-pushing story… All the labelling comes after the fact, doesn’t it?”
Co-lead Skarsgård calls Pillion a “coming-of-age story,” one rooted in the later-in-life awakening (sexually and otherwise) of Melling’s Colin. Indeed, the film even indulges in a classic cinematic rite of passage with Ray whisking Colin away from his parents’ house on the back of a motorcycle (aka riding “pillion”) – leading to a night full of adolescent excitement, possibility, and a ‘memorable’ second date…the kind where one ends up airborne in a bottomless wrestling costume. Skarsgård shares, “Even though Colin is in his thirties, he’s very sexually inexperienced, and he doesn’t really know what he wants out of a relationship… [My character] knows exactly what he wants. That contrast was quite interesting.”
“It’s a very ugly love story. There are too many phoney beautiful ones,” Mars-Jones says of Pillion.
And due to writer/director Lighton now framing the story around Christmas, can it also now be considered a Christmas film?” “Hell yeah!”, Lighton enthuses. “I mean, it begins and ends at Christmas… And I, as my producers will tell you, I’m obsessed with Christmas films, so I hope that people will see it as [such] for sure.”
This seasonal shift, made possible by filming holiday scenes in summer in the London town of Bromley, allowed the film “to [run] down a completely different emotional landscape,” according to Mars-Jones. Like the unexpected Christmas settings of films past, such as Iron Man 3 and Eyes Wide Shut, Pillion employs the holiday backdrop as a year-end reflection point, tapping into the emotions that surface this time of year as its characters reassess who they are, what they want, and what (or who) they’re missing as the new year approaches.
The audience (and Ray) first meet a candy-striped Colin singing barbershop in a well-tinseled pub, the one corner of his life where he feels any confidence at all. His world is small, and he lets life just pass him by.
Enter Alexander Skarsgård.
Though Mars-Jones gave Lighton his blessing to adapt his material however he would like, as they both appreciate that films and novels are very different mediums. One thing that didn’t change? For Ray, they needed an enigmatic, physical ‘specimen’ – so impossibly handsome that he could show up randomly in your life, and by the next day, you would happily shave your head, agree to sleep sans blanket and mattress on the ground every night, and swap your mundane suburban life to join a community of kinky, queer bikers.
In the novella, the “yellow-haired”, “drop-dead gorgeous” Ray is described as 6’5″ and Colin as 5’6″ – a striking height difference that visually serves to amplify the asymmetry of their relationship. On screen, five-time ‘Sweden’s Sexiest Man Alive’ Alexander Skarsgård (reportedly 6’4″ or 6’5”) and his co-star Harry Melling (5’9”) aren’t separated by nearly a foot, but their characters’ imbalance is still ever-present.
Mars-Jones admits that Skarsgård’s attachment to the project was a shock. The author explains that he’s grown used to options fizzling out – one of his short stories was even optioned by the sound recordist of the Tom Cruise-starrer Days of Thunder, but the project never came to life. “When [I was told] ‘some major stars are interested,’ I thought, ‘No, they’re not.’ That’s just what you say to get money. And then when they said ‘Alexander Skarsgård is on board’ – really? It’s hard to find somebody as really perfect as the character is supposed to be.”
Lighton’s first meeting with Skarsgård sealed the deal. The actor flew into London for a single night and texted Lighton: “Do you want to come to an Arcade Fire concert?” Lighton joined Skarsgård, of course, at the Brixton Academy – and the two “spent the night drinking and dancing, and occasionally talking about Pillion. It was a good night,” Lighton laughs. “He’s a fun guy.”
In April of last year, Skarsgård’s casting was announced, with the actor also boarding the project as an executive producer.
Though Skarsgård admits that he’s definitely had a few roles in the past that he found scary to take on, he tells me that Ray wasn’t one of them. “A lot of people were like, ‘Oh, a BDSM, kinky gay biker movie by a first-time filmmaker – was that scary?… It’s an incredible screenplay. It’s so good. And then I had one conversation with Harry Lighton… And he’s extraordinary… I just felt so confident in him and his ability to kind of tell this story in the right way, so I didn’t hesitate for a second.”
And long before the awards piled up for Skarsgård, he was already trusting first-time writer-directors with tricky sexual material – memorably in Marielle Heller’s feature-film debut The Diary of a Teenage Girl, where he played the boyfriend to a single mom of a sexually-curious 15-year-old girl, who, in desperation, willingly loses her virginity to Skarsgård’s character. Tricky, for sure. Pillion is less morally complex. Melling’s Colin does lose various virginities to Skarsgård, but as Skarsgård says, “It’s a consensual relationship, and Colin can leave anytime he wants.”
As for the nudity and explicit BDSM scenes the film calls for? They don’t rattle Skarsgård in the slightest, a trait he clearly inherited from his father, Stellan, who’s no stranger to stripping down on film (famously for Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves). As Stellan Skarsgård has told IndieWire about himself, he’s been “so naked so much [he’s] lost count,” both on screen and even while doing everyday tasks around the house. Alexander shares that same lack of self-consciousness, putting his beefy physicality on display in mainstream fare such as True Blood as well as more arthouse projects like Infinity Pool and The Northman.
For those scenes and the less raunchy ones, Skarsgård admits that, in lieu of rehearsing, he and Melling chose to “just let it happen in front of the camera – [Melling’s character] being obedient and submissive, but also coming into his own and figuring out what he wanted out of a relationship.”
Like in its source material, Pillion is unafraid to have a wholesome family dinner one minute and a very naked Skarsgård two minutes later. The more sexually explicit content of Pillion sits alongside comedy while also straddling more emotionally brutal moments between the two men. Lighton reflects on the latter, saying, “I think we probably need to see more vulnerable men in life. But that said, Ray’s version of vulnerability is not an obvious version of vulnerability. I think whatever way as a male, you portray yourself, whether you kind of wear masculinity as an armour, it probably speaks to a vulnerability about yourself.”
“Ignore the prosthetic – this and that. Ignore the kinky stuff!” Mars-Jones jokes. Under the whips and chains, Pillion is really about two vulnerable men – one who desperately is trying to make the relationship work, even though the other can’t give him what he wants long-term. Yes, very relatable.
Mars-Jones tells me that there’s a pivotal expression in the book that conveys the vulnerability at the heart of the story – a moment that originally hinges on Ray’s death two-thirds of the way through the novella, a major plot point that the film eschews for a different kind of devastation. “He doesn’t die, and I didn’t see how…they were going to get to a moment of crisis without that,” Mars-Jones admits. “[But] there’s an expression on Alex’s face towards the end of the film, which, whether he just did it in one take or whether it took weeks to get exactly the right mixes of emotion, I don’t remember when I’ve seen such an intense mixture of conflicting emotion on a face at the same time. He does a really good job.” Alexander Skarsgård: Golden Globe, Emmy, SAG winner, and perhaps soon-to-be Oscar/Bafta nominee?
I can confirm that the transcendent 90 seconds Mars-Jones refers to are absolutely enough to spark awards chatter around Skarsgård for this film. It’s the same kind of final, devastating “look” that The White Lotus has perfected in its finales – notably with Meghann Fahy’s Harper in season two, then with Patrick Schwarzenegger in season three, his Saxon-tinged look of longing as Chelsea runs to Rick – the sort of moment that prompts the internet to make TikToks on giving that person “all the awards.”
And kudos to Lighton as well. Pillion is a very confident first feature from him. Though the film had its world premiere at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, where it received the Un Certain Regard ‘Best Screenplay’ and has screened along a lengthy international festival circuit, Lighton is especially eager for UK audiences to see the film. “There’s lines which I’m excited to see a London audience react to… There’s a gag about Chislehurst,” he tells me. “We played [the film] in New York recently, and it was a great screening, but they didn’t understand the joke.”
London will soon. Perhaps too well. Pillion is now playing in UK cinemas.
