Stellan Skarsgård was initially caught off guard when his son Alexander Skarsgård enlisted in the Swedish armed forces.
“You went into the military. Did you do that in opposition to me, to provoke me?” Stellan, 74, asked Alexander, 49, during Variety & CNN’s “Actors on Actors” series, which was published Friday, December 12. “I felt f***ed.”
Alexander, who has now followed in his dad’s footsteps as an actor, enlisted in Sweden’s Marine Corps when he was 19. (Alexander, one of Stellan’s eight children, briefly acted as a child in Sweden but quit at age 13.)
“Looking back, I don’t think it was an act of rebellion against you,” Alexander said. “But coming from a bohemian family, I was like, ‘I want to find my own path.’ The most extreme contrast would be to go into the military. So it wasn’t a conscious, ‘F*** you, Dad’ thing.”
According to Alexander, he “never” even knew that Stellan was dismayed by his enlistment.
“You’re a tremendous actor, Father, because I never felt that,” the Pillion star acknowledged.
Stellan, meanwhile, didn’t ever want to talk Alexander out of joining the armed forces.
“I am not the kind of father who says, ‘No, you shouldn’t do that.’ I don’t interfere with your decisions,” the Mamma Mia! actor recalled. “But being a military evader like me, it felt like, ‘Oh, wow.’ I also knew that all you eight kids have different ways of approaching everything. Maybe I’m lazy, but I think it’s best to let you do it on your own.”
When Alexander signed up to join the Marine Corps, it was “semi-mandatory,” which was a change from Stellan’s own adolescence amid completely mandatory conscriptions.
“I went to a friend who worked at a drug rehabilitation institution,” Stellan told his son of how he got out of service. “I made him write a letter to the draft board saying, ‘If you feel that Skarsgård is fit for military service, keep him under special surveillance because he might influence other kids. He smokes hashish.’ Four hours later, I got a message from the draft: ‘Don’t come here. Don’t go near us.’”
Stellan’s acting career had always taken off at that point.
“I was working as an actor in the theater,” he said. “I quit school when I was 17 because I got a theater offer in another town.”
As for Alexander, he was bitten by the acting bug after his military duty ended and he started taking drama lessons in college.
“It was 2000, [and] you were shooting a movie in L.A. I came out to visit, and I had just finished drama school in New York and didn’t have representation in Sweden,” Alexander recalled to his dad. “Your old manager was like, ‘Gee, I’ll send you out to an audition. Wouldn’t that be fun?’ It was for Zoolander, and I got a small part in the movie. Two weeks later, I’m in Tribeca shooting with Ben Stiller.”
The Big Little Lies alum continued, “I was very naive because I’d only been to one audition, and I’d booked it. I was, like, ‘It’s a piece of cake. You just walk in and Ben Stiller’s there and then they fly you business class to New York and you shoot.’ Then, I realized it was a lot harder [and] it was many years of auditioning and not booking anything.”
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