The TV show Stellan Skarsgård banned his children from watching: “He was vehemently against it”
There are quite a few different actors in the mix for next year’s ‘Best Actor’ Oscar, from Michael B Jordan in Sinners to Timothée Chalamet for Marty Supreme, but you can also add Stellan Skarsgård to the mix, thanks to his performance in Joachim Trier’s follow-up to 2021’s The Worst Person in the World, named Sentimental Value.
It tells the story of an ageing film director who has a complicated relationship with his two daughters, but manages to make the situation worse by deciding to make a film about the family struggles. The subject matter of the film will have been close to home for Skarsgård, not perhaps due to fractured kinships but because his adult life has been spent making movies, and his well-known son Bill followed suit, appearing in the likes of IT, Nosferatu and John Wick 4.
The elder Skarsgård has been at it for some seven decades now, working with some of the finest directors in history on some of the highest-grossing franchises. His films have collectively earned an astonishing $3.5bn at the box office thanks to huge hits including Good Will Hunting, Pirates of the Caribbean, Marvel’s Thor, Dune and the Star Wars spin-off series Andor.
He was winning awards as early as 1982 for his role in the Swedish drama The Simple-minded Murderer, and it didn’t take long for Hollywood to start to take notice, as he earned a role in Sean Connery’s submarine thriller The Hunt for Red October in 1990
The Swede is also well known for his long-running partnership with controversial Danish director Lars Von Trier – the pair have knocked out five films together. And while he’s admitted he’s not the biggest fan of working in telly, his most acclaimed role in recent years was without doubt the 2019 mini-series Chernobyl, which told the story of the nuclear disaster back in the ’80s.
He picked up multiple awards for his role as Boris Shcherbina in the production, including a Golden Globe, and the series itself has gone down as one of the greats of the past decade or so – indeed, it currently rates as the highest-scored series of all time on IMDB.
Hearing about Bill’s upbringing with an actor of such repute as a father, it seems there was never much choice about the path his son would follow. Stellan would show him classics of almost every genre, including classic westerns, Akira Kurosawa Japanese movies, Chaplin films and The Godfather.
But despite that, there were still some things that were not considered suitable by Stellan and if anything was overly-violent for the sake of it that was off limits. Bill told Esquire: “Whenever violence was romanticized or unrealistic – like, ten head kicks in Power Rangers—he was vehemently against it. My dad was morally against violence. So I wasn’t allowed to have toy guns.”
Despite the fact that Power Rangers was a no-no, it seems Bill still wanted to experience the more combative elements of human nature, saying, “I’ve never held those ideals. I grew up in a different time. I don’t think playing a violent video game makes you a violent person. Actually, I’ve always found violence fascinating.”
Skarsgård senior, meanwhile, is excited about his latest film, imitating real life to some extent, talking about the ability to play a director on the big screen, he said: “I mean, what an opportunity for revenge.”
