Stellan Skarsgård Breaks Down His Career, from 'Mamma Mia!' to 'Dune: Part Two'

I can't decide to become an actor.

It's not something final in my life.

So I'm doing it as long as I think it's fun,

and when I grow up and become old, I'll get a real job.

[bright music]

I'm Stellan Skarsgard,

and this is a timeline of my career.

[music concludes]

[boys speaking foreign language]

It was a TV series.

It was a kind of Swedish Huckleberry Finn,

and there was only one channel in Sweden at the time.

Can you imagine? One TV channel.

That means that everybody sees it

and everybody knows about it.

I tried for it, there were thousands of kids trying for it,

and I tried for it, and then I got it,

and then I became like a pop star

and I was only 16

and there were girls fainting and screaming and, Ah!

It was a kind of experience that would've broken me

if I hadn't had such good parents

because they made sure to bring me down to reality.

You do realize

that I will have to go back soon, don't you?

When I read Breaking the Waves,

I said, Yes!

Finally a love story that I can relate to,

because it was more about the very idea of love

than about if they would get married

or if they would have a happy life or everything.

It was a very beautiful script.

Wonderful Emily Watson. It was her first film as well.

For an English actress, young actress, to come out

and do a film with a kind of weird Danish director

and a middle-aged Swedish man

and doing a lot of sex scenes with that,

it was very brave of her.

How could you take it?

How could you keep away from the boys?

I waited for you. [Jan laughing]

I had a smaller international career before that.

It generated a lot of jobs.

It had premiered in Cannes and they went crazy.

Since I had had thousands of teenage girls screaming

when I was 16, I could deal with any pressure.

I learned one thing,

and that is that it's always a tomorrow.

There's always a day when you don't have a job.

There's always a day when it has faded away,

the fame and beauty and fuss about the film.

But more important is what you do with your life.

It is, after all, just a film.

[Will] The commute is killing me.

Yeah, sure, but did you think of the possibility-

That's right. It's right.

Just take it home with you.

I was shooting at Rhode Island with Spielberg.

I got this call.

They wanted to see me in Boston,

so they sent down a limousine and I traveled up there

and I met those guys and I read the script in the limousine

and it was very good.

We talked about it and we read and we sat down

and we changed things immediately

and everybody was so excited

and the collaboration was so, so vivid.

And then we went out and got drunk

and that limousine had to wait all night.

We were in South Boston,

which was at that time very dangerous.

And we had this big limousine

standing outside of those seedy bars,

but the limousine eventually delivered me

to Rhode Island again. [laughing]

I liked them very much.

It was obvious that they were very talented

and it made me very happy later on

that when the film was such a success,

it gave them more possibilities to work.

He pushes people away

before they have a chance to leave him.

It's a defense mechanism, all right?

And for 20 years he's been alone because of that.

Robin Williams. He's a fantastic man.

He's like he has three brains

working high speed at the same time.

And there are funny things coming out all the time.

I think it's a sort of security thing

because he is not that funny when you are alone with him,

and then when the more people comes,

he become more funny.

He improvised a lot.

You didn't know exactly what was gonna happen in the scene,

and I liked that, all actors told,

but suddenly he was sounded like another actor,

like a director he knew or something.

It was something weird going on all the time.

And we had a lot of fun so we laughed a lot,

but eventually, of course,

we had to retake many of those scenes.

[dramatic music]

Gore Verbinski called me

and he showed me some pictures of the guy

and I saw that it was all barnacles.

And he said, No, no, don't worry about it.

You won't wear that all the time.

You'll just have two or three

and then they do the rest with the CGI.

And then we started trying out the makeup

and it was so beautiful.

It was Joel Howard who did it,

and he was painting it by hand, you know, and the details.

And so we decided to go full makeup for the whole time.

That meant that I came every morning

at two o'clock in the morning, I came,

and sat in the chair till eight o'clock.

Then the rest of my crew came in.

The other sailors on the boat, they put on the pajamas,

all gray and four dots here, and then going in.

It was really hard,

but I like that character, not because he...

I don't care about if they're big or small roles.

It's something about the...

When you find a unique personality,

whether it's an exterior or interior,

to play with, it's fantastic.

Gore Verbinski, he's not a very commercial director.

In some ways he's an absurdist director.

On the set, you felt that you were working

on a much smaller film because you had much more freedom

and everything was accommodating you.

They moved the camera.

That was also what made the first one so good

because the actors had freedom.

But might I suggest that we all reconvene on your boat?

Good idea.

No.

Why? It's an adventure, Harry.

It's good for you. Oh.

It was absurd to ask me to be in a musical.

I can't sing, I can't dance.

And then I saw it was also Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth

and they can't sing and dance either.

So I felt a little safer there.

And then I understood that we were just supposed

to be like in a film that is produced by men

and directed by men and with men in the leads,

you have the bimbo,

and we were the bimbo in this female production.

We didn't have to be anything but look cute and be silly.

There's only one thing that was asked of us

and that was have fun,

because if we don't have fun, it won't be a film.

Me and Colin coming to dance lessons

with blokes in our slacks and our little Paul Smith shirts

and everything, and everybody.

The 60 dancers that are dressed up, like dancers are.

We really tried for a month and a half

trying to dance to Voulez-Vous

and we failed.

Okay. [Thor and Erik laughing]

Oh, I still don't think you are the God of Thunder.

but you ought to be. [Thor chuckling]

The film was fun.

We lived in Santa Fe

where they have more Birkenstocks and gray ponytails

than anywhere else in the United States.

No, I wasn't excited.

I was... What the fuck?

I didn't know much about Thor...

Or I knew about the real Thor,

but I didn't know much about the comic books.

So the thing was that Kenneth Branagh was directing it

and he's good.

I said, Okay, I'll do it,

but the thing is, that when you sign up for one of these,

you sign up for four.

So I felt I sold my soul to the devil, but I didn't,

because especially that first one, I had a lot of fun.

It was me and Kat Dennings and Natalie Portman, the trio.

We were constantly together in all those scenes,

and I had so much fun and I learned so much about girls

because most of the time, we were stuck in a car

and we were waiting and it was a film car,

and I just listened to those two girls talking about men.

Yeah, I mean, I didn't think it was like that.

You learn.

Why did I continue to do Marvel after that?

I had a contract and it was fun doing those small things.

You don't have to be too pretentious about what you do.

It's not a crime

to do not-high-brow material.

I'm here tonight playing a sort of double role.

On Michael's side, I'm the best man,

but coincidentally, I'm also the employer of the bride.

When I worked with some of the kids,

you almost can't take it seriously, you know?

It's like, Really? You are that character?

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

It doesn't work.

Like I worked with one once on Gustaf

in a period piece, and we both had beards on

and the first time we came on set, we started laughing.

We couldn't stop.

But it's lovely because you have the same kind of humor,

you have the same kind of the way of reading the script

and it's very easy and it's very safe.

And also, you feel loved.

It's very nice.

It is really full of love that Lars von Trier says.

It's fun.

Even if he does films about horrible things,

he's very dark in this material,

you have fun when you do it.

We laughed a lot during that.

[Liv] But it can't just be swept under the rug.

What can't? Harriet.

Well, we can talk about it later.

Uh...

We can talk about it now.

Fincher decided to make a Swedish independent film

for 100 million dollars.

He came to Stockholm and tried to find a crew

that could even move a set in two hours.

But there's nobody

who can move a set in two hours in Sweden.

I met him first and he asked me if I wanted to do this role,

and I said, yeah, I wanted to do the role.

And he said, But you don't wanna work with me. he said.

Oh, why not?

Because I take maybe 20 or 30 or 40 times.

I do takes of each scene, he said,

and I said, Well, it's fine if I can do whatever I want.

That means I got freedom.

I can fuck up 39 takes of them. So that's good.

And I don't think he understood that freely,

but it was like that.

I felt totally safe.

I could do whatever I wanted.

[ethereal music] What happened to her?

I was very calm during those takes.

It was wonderful to torture Daniel Craig to Enya.

Is this really the way it all works?

An uninformed, arbitrary decision that will cost

who knows how many lies made by some apparatchik,

some career party man?

I'm a career party man.

You should watch your tone, Comrade Liazo.

Well, the first thing was,

I looked at the picture of the real person.

I decided that was not his look.

So I took another look.

There was a Soviet leader called Kosygin at the time,

and he had white hair and he would've a little brush up.

So I based it on Kosygin.

Nobody knows but me.

The thing is that not even HBO thought

that it would be a success,

but they thought it was important to do it.

That was HBO back then. In those days, it was...

It's different now. It had no plus after.

And they didn't expect it to become a success,

but they thought it was important to make it,

and they wanted to make it as a quality production.

Fortunately, it had an enormous impact

and a lot of people saw it.

And I hope they understand

that it is about the sort of cowardice

of everybody in society.

It goes for everybody.

It's not only in the Soviet society,

it goes to our society too.

The cowardice of sort of accepting the rule

and the power of the time.

The Golden Globe, the year after, were sort of discredited,

so it doesn't matter. [laughing]

They're all sort of weird, those...

It's fun.

It's fun when you're appreciated. You know it.

And you get the statue

and it says that you're appreciated,

because I'm appreciated.

I did something.

You can point at it, but of course,

it's meaningless, those.

You know how many millions it cost to get an Oscar?

Would you rather give it all at once to something real?

What would we be stealing?

The quarterly payroll for an entire imperial sector.

Human beings are more than two characters.

We are different when we meet our family

and when we are with our friends and when we are...

It's sort of a natural state,

but played two characters here in Andor, or it was like...

First of all, it was very well written.

It was Tony Gilroy who wrote it.

It's like Star Wars for grownups.

It's a very oppressive society, it's a fascist society

and you feel the presence of it.

The characters are very well drawn.

Kindness, kinship, love.

I've given up all chance at inner peace.

I made my mind a sunless space.

I share my dreams with ghosts.

[Interviewer] And you said that you had

to do this speech 10 times.

Had to do?

I did it 10 times because it wasn't good.

I mean, not exactly, but if you know

that something is wrong...

Ah, you know it's wrong, you know it's wrong, you know...

Ah! It's not wrong.

Finally, I got a script that was like a character

that I wanted to play as a 10-year-old.

And then of course, who doesn't want to fly a ship?

A spaceship? Who doesn't want to shoot with ray guns?

I mean, it's the little boy in me.

You tried to kill me?

This morning you were a playboy.

Feared and envied.

but tonight you're a hero.

I was so attracted by Denis Villeneuve.

I've seen his films and he's a great cinematic poet

and at the same time, he makes his film popular,

box-office hits.

It's a unique combination.

It was also that the role wasn't that big

so you could survive

and it was good that it was so concentrated.

I suggested that they cut out some scenes

because you wanted to make him more like a stock

that has boiled very well together.

So when he comes in, you should notice it.

You shouldn't waste him by throwing him in

in every second scene or something.

It was a terrible mistake to take the role, [laughing]

if I wanted to be comfortable.

And when I was naked, I had eight hours

in the stool every day.

It was painful.

I didn't drink all day because I couldn't pee, right?

And I ate Imodium every morning,

so it was not good for me, but I managed to do it

without shitting and peeing for a week. [chuckles]

I've been very, very lucky.

I have eight kids and I've managed to be with the family

and see my kids grow up.

I really enjoy that life.

And sometimes I take a film because I like the crew

and the people working on it

and I don't give a fuck if it's good or...

It's wonderful.

I think everybody should envy me.

[bright music]