The movie Stellan Skarsgård had to shoot twice: “Not groundhog day, but something worse”
As well as contributing about a hundred children who all turned into actors, Stellan Skarsgård has made more than his fair share of great movies.
As well as cropping up in major franchises like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Dune, he can also be found in acclaimed dramas like Good Will Hunting and Melancholia. There was a small blip with the whole ‘Mamma Mia!’ thing, but he’s built up enough respect for us to gloss over that.
An oft-forgotten part of the Swede’s career is the prequels to the classic horror flick The Exorcist. As you’re about to find out, he’s probably quite glad that they’ve been overlooked. Skarsgård played a younger version of Father Lancaster Merrin in both Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. The two films came out within a year of each other, which is just weird, and that’s because this was never the goddamn plan.
Paul Schrader was originally brought in to helm the project, but the top brass at the production company thought his version of the story wasn’t scary enough. So, they hired Finnish director Renny Harlin to essentially remake the film, which eventually resulted in The Beginning. As Skarsgård recalled to AV Club many years later, the studio should have seen this coming.
“I don’t know what the studio expected when they hired Paul Schrader to direct the film and me to play the lead,” he said. “Of course, they don’t get a horror film, they get a film about a man in crisis. So then they get Renny Harlin to do the job, and then of course they get a horror film.”
Adding, “The weird thing was, when you think you’re finished with something, you put it behind and move on. I made another film in between, and then I have to go back to Rome and put on the same clothes again? I doubt they were even washed. It was not a Groundhog Day feeling, but in some ways something worse.”
Skarsgård was one of the few cast members to keep his job after Harlin took over the reins. Even with his considerable talent, there was nothing that could be done to rescue this massive ass shitstorm. Exorcist: The Beginning is a textbook example of a movie ruined by the studio. It didn’t help that Harlin was run over by a car during production, resulting in him having to direct most of the film on crutches.
Schrader’s work did eventually see the light of day. Dominion was the result of the director persuading Warner Bros to give his version of the story a limited theatrical release. Audiences weren’t super keen to watch a different version of a film that had come out only a few months prior, so the film only earned roughly a quarter of a million dollars in box office receipts. Critics weren’t majorly keen on it either, although they agreed it was an improvement on Harlin’s disastrous attempt. Schrader later revealed that the entire process made him feel like a “sucker”.
The Exorcist series has been cursed with many, many bad follow-ups to the original. Skarsgård is just one of many lives made worse by coming into contact with a franchise that should have been laid to rest a very long time ago.
