“This was something else”: the 2015 role that convinced Stellan Skarsgård to break a lifetime habit
Although international cinephiles first recognised Stellan Skarsgård through his collaborations with Lars von Trier, he earned a few major English-language roles early on in his career, including The Hunt for Red October and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, leading him to become a beloved actor who’s tried his hand at a bit of everything, in varying media.
Recently, his nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’ at the Academy Awards for Sentimental Value served not only as recognition for a career-best performance, but also as an honour granted to an actor who has been a reliable, consistently hard worker.
Skarsgård has been a movie actor, first and foremost, which may explain why he had some hesitations about doing television, for the rigorous preparations he goes through in order to get into character might not be conducive to the rate of those shoots.
However, he was so enamoured by his part in the detective series River that he agreed to take a chance on a style and genre that hadn’t previously interested him, revealing, “I constantly turn down police shows, but this was something else. Not linear storytelling, but impressionistic. Normally, the story is the skeleton, and you put meat on it. Here, there’s almost no skeleton, which means the meat has to be fucking firm to keep it together.”
River was a six-episode detective thriller created by Abi Morgan, who has also penned films like The Invisible Woman, The Iron Lady, Shame, and Suffragette, where Skarsgård portrayed a troubled police officer faced with challenging expectations that forced him to reflect upon his past, and it also featured a cast of notable British actors, including Eddie Marsan and Nicola Walker.
The hesitations that some actors have about television have changed in recent years because they are often treated with the same respect and diligence as cinema; in fact, it is much easier to sell a sobering drama aimed at mature viewers on streaming than it is to convince them to trek out to the theatre.
Police shows tend to generally be associated with the procedural format, but River was a more singular work that told a confined story, while also being a one-shot limited event that ensured that Skarsgård wouldn’t have to worry about signing on to future seasons.
River came right at the moment in which streaming television was beginning to take off, and Skarsgård benefited from his acceptance of the new medium just four years later when he played a major role in the HBO limited event series Chernobyl, which won him a Golden Globe and earned him a Primetime Emmy Award nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor in a Limited Series or Motion Picture Produced for Television’, while the series itself was hailed for taking a grounded look at the biggest nuclear disaster in history, and for showing the deadly ways in which history repeats itself.
Skarsgård would earn just as much acclaim when he joined the Star Wars universe to play the Rebel leader Luthen Rael in the Disney+ series Andor, created by Tony Gilroy, a prequel to Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. It explored the Rebel spy Cassian, played by Diego Luna, as he joins a resistance group during the dark times under the reign of the Galactic Empire and was by far the most mature and political Star Wars project ever made, with Skarsgård’s involvement certainly granting it an added layer of credibility.
