Bill Skarsgård

In particular, it’s this neighbourhood of Stockholm: Södermalm, one of the 14 islands that make up the Swedish capital. Once farmland, it developed into the city’s working-class district. Some historians would even say it used to be a slum. To really understand Skarsgård, you have to come here. The place we meet – an abandoned women’s refuge turned upmarket hotel restaurant (Google rating: 3.7) – is significant because he remembers it as it used to be: derelict and uncared for. Since Skarsgård’s birth in 1990, the area has become progressively more bohemian, more gentrified. “This is our Williamsburg,” he says. His whole family, including all seven of his siblings and half siblings, still live within walking distance of it.

Of this immediate family, an almost preposterous number are actors:

Does he agree with that interpretation? “Absolutely not,” he says. “I get asked regularly, ‘How does it feel to do something without prosthetics?’ when 98 per cent of my jobs don’t feature prosthetics. It’s just the exposure you get from the jobs that tend to define you.”

One of those defining jobs is the one most people have seen, even if they wouldn’t recognise Skarsgård within it. In the 2017 adaptation of ‘It’, Stephen King’s twisted clown horror, Skarsgård is buried beneath the marshmallow cheeks and fanged grin of Pennywise, its villain. The other film he’s referring to is 2024’s ‘Nosferatu’, from horror auteur Robert Eggers. To play the centuries-old Transylvanian nobleman Count Orlok, Skarsgård spent hours in the prosthetics chair and contorted his voice with the help of an opera teacher to reach a growly lower octave. But beneath his rotting flesh, Skarsgård was able to capture a magnetism so convincingly that ‘Men’s Health’ – along with large swathes of social media – dubbed his character “2024’s sexiest man.”

These films, both well received and commercially successful, allowed Skarsgård to flex his freakish ability to transform. That’s good because Skarsgård is an all-in kind of guy, who has a tendency to give as much of himself as he can, even if the project warranted a simpler approach. During the making of ‘Nosferatu’, he isolated himself from his castmates for most of the shoot. To lead the 2024 remake of ‘The Crow’, he followed a strict diet, largely composed of steak tartare and raw eggs.

“You just don’t notice what it takes from you, or how it consumes you when you’re doing it,” he says, reflecting on the commitment he tends to put in for his roles. “It’s hard to be self-aware enough [to recognise it], until my partner says, ‘Yeah, you’re dark.’”

And despite all of that, it’s not uncommon for Skarsgård to watch something he broke his back to make, and soon realise: “It’s just two hours of popcorn.” So he’s made a pact with himself: one large-scale genre project – a horror, fantasy, or thriller – and then a weird, indie drama that barely a fraction of that larger film’s audience will see. It’s a to-and-fro to keep his juices flowing.

Since then, they have become “very close friends.” Whenever they are in the same city, they tend to hang around together in the studio, along with Mustafa’s collaborators, including Dev Hynes and Daniel Caesar. “I’m very envious of their sessions,” Bill says. “The control and the freedom of their art. So much of it is being in a room with other artists, vibing. You can make a masterpiece in an afternoon.”

So far they have spent time in studios in at least three different countries: Stockholm’s Ingrid Studios, London’s RAK Studios, and New York’s Electric Lady Studios. Mustafa tells me that, in one of their Electric Lady sessions, Skarsgård recited lyrics written by Hynes in the voice of Count Orlok. “There is a play that he defends with the life of him,” Mustafa says. Despite what Skarsgård thinks, Mustafa sees his friend as “a very sovereign person. He doesn’t have this pernicious desire to have a dominion over Hollywood. That’s a testament to his artistry, and the fact that he cares about making the right decisions.”

Skarsgård hasn’t been on a film set since February. That’s an active decision he made after working on four productions back-to-back over the course of a year, on an itinerary that took him across the globe, sometimes with barely a weekend of rest between projects.

“What were you like in school?” I ask, veering away from the topic of work.

He slips his jacket on and says: “Why don’t we take a walk?”

Europe is in the grip of a summer heatwave but Stockholm is overcast, the sky a uniform cast-iron grey. It rained so heavily last night you have to avoid puddles on the pavement. Skarsgård, jacket on, cap pulled politely over his eyes, points down the street between two buildings, and I follow his lead.

“These streets feel like they’re mine,” he says, because he’s wandered them forever. There’s an unwritten code in Södermalm, where Skarsgård spottings are almost as common as pigeons. If a local spots a Skarsgård, there might be a polite acknowledgement, but no one causes a scene. “Here it doesn’t matter, because it feels like they’re in my living room. If I’m in another borough, it feels different.”

This attitude towards the family is largely rooted in two things: their good behaviour and a different approach to fame in Sweden. The Skarsgård dynasty have built a positive reputation amongst locals because they do good work and seldom find themselves caught up in tabloid hysteria. They do not offer themselves up for public consumption in the way stars in America do. For example, there is an Instagram account under Bill Skarsgård’s name with over a million followers – but it does not belong to him. For a man who permeates so much of pop culture and, by dint of this, is globally famous, he has little to no interest in exacerbating that fame. He has, to date, appeared in two superhero movies. His first was the R-rated Marvel comedy ‘Deadpool 2’. He played a mutant named Zeitgeist who is able to spit acidic vomit and, after a very brief appearance, dies in a comical accident. He also appears in Chloé Zhao’s ‘Eternals’, a film famous for taking the Marvel franchise in a more cerebral direction. Lucky for Skarsgård’s ambivalence towards fame, he appeared via voice only, and the movie flopped.

We are walking the same streets that baby Bill Skarsgård did, first in a pushchair, next in the arms of his mother and father, then as a teenager, a flyspeck away from adult responsibility. “It feels like I know my roots here,” he says. “[It’s] like a small town where you know everybody.” We make a detour to check out his former primary school, which is painted in an off-kilter colour. He passes it all the time but hasn’t been inside since he left there. On evenings when it’s closed, he might stroll by and peek through the window to see what’s changed. Between grades one and six, “all of us went here,” Skarsgård says, listing off his siblings.

Skarsgård’s father, Stellan, moved to Stockholm in 1972, joining the ensemble of the Royal Dramatic Theatre at the age of 21. Stellan was the first in his family to properly pursue a creative endeavour, kickstarting what has become something of a family business. His dad’s father, Bill says, was “a really shitty accountant with the soul of an artist. He wanted to be an actor.” His mother’s father was a dentist by trade. If you look back far through their family history you’ll find that most of the Skarsgård clan, on both sides, were seafarers, drawn to the water.

Before relocating to Stockholm, Stellan had moved around a lot as a child, spending summer vacations in the coastal town of Kalmar. They continue to return to their roots by visiting a country house on an island nearby. “My great-grandfather built it in 1924,” Skarsgård says, “So my granddad spent every summer there, my dad spent every summer there, and we spent summers there as kids.”

The whole family will go to the country house soon to celebrate Midsommar, the Swedish holiday. To the non-Swedish layman, its reputation has been maimed slightly by the gnarly A24 horror movie of the same name, in which a group of visiting tourists fall victim to a murderous cult while celebrating the holiday. Skarsgård assures that there’s very little crossover. “It’s kind of like a New Year’s Eve, like a drinking holiday, but to mark the start of the summer” he says. No human sacrifice. “Once you start having kids, other people are bringing their kids, and it becomes like a different thing, but when you’re younger, it’s all about getting fucked up. Everybody has that one Midsommar where you’re in a state of delirium.” I ask if he has a story about a Midsommar of his youth. “I do!” he says, laughing coyly. “I just don’t want to tell you.”

Before he decided to be an actor, Bill at least initially resisted the desire to follow in his father’s and brothers’ footsteps, instead leaning into academia. He majored in natural sciences, and earned good enough grades to go on to study at medical school if he had wanted to. Although this might sound like a rejection of family tradition, it actually placed him within another impressive, albeit less glitzy, Skarsgård vocation: both his mother and Sam, his 44-year-old brother, are physicians. He would later obviously change his mind, making his adult acting debut in a Swedish comedy called ‘Simple Simon’.

The building looms high above us like something from one of Skarsgård’s horror movies, with crunchy gravel underfoot. It is quiet despite being the middle of the school day. “This is when I got more serious: you had to have all A’s to get in,” he says. “But I went from being at the top of my class, kind of breezing my way through it in junior high to thinking: ‘Okay, shit. This is fucking serious.’” Upon graduating, he was awarded the distinction of “slacker of the year.” “I think I could be pretty extroverted, you know – cocky,” he says of his demeanour back then. “But of course it was all rooted in deep insecurity.”

Not far from Södra Latin is the apartment in which generations of Skarsgårds – Bill included – grew up. From the outside it’s unassuming. The facade feels of its time, but everything at street level alludes to that gentrification that has swept through the neighbourhood: bubble tea shops and over-priced vintage boutiques. “My parents moved in here in the early ’80s, and there was no inherent value in apartments. This was by far the most run-down neighbourhood in the inner city. Everyone was like them: bohemians and artists.”

Pointing down the street to other apartment buildings, he talks me through the logistics of his parents doing rent swaps with other locals that would eventually result in the eight-room apartment where the entire family would live together. There is a nuclear family set-up in Sweden that most adhere to: a father, a mother, one or maybe two children. Skarsgård bonded with the Middle Eastern kids in school because “they were the only people I knew that also had five siblings living in the same apartment. Our household was just complete chaos.”

We turn a corner and three teenagers gasp and say some words I don’t understand. Skarsgård, who’s just pointed out the pub where fans of Hammarby, his favourite football team, gather, starts to drift mentally for a second. He registers that he’s been recognised. Shortly after, these teenagers dressed in hoodies approach him in a breathless flurry, and ask for a picture, which he gamely obliges before they go on with their day in disbelief. Based on their enthusiasm, which makes him seem a little bashful, Skarsgård says, “I can tell they’re not from here.” Barely five minutes later, another person waves at Skarsgård from down the street, and he stops to chat. This time, it’s his younger brother Valter.

It looks functional, unremarkable. “Going here was crazy,” Skarsgård says. He tells me stories about the rival factions that were split across the district of Södermalm, with groups of 40, 50 or more coming together to fight each other, like a turf war lifted out of ‘West Side Story’. Then, all of a sudden, he found himself in the studious, uptight environment of Södra Latin, where work became the focus. “Truthfully,” he says, pointing up to the weathered windows of the concrete hunk, “I missed this.”

This school was a place to misbehave – and to escape. It was during his years here that he realised he was no longer reliant on grown-ups. Though she’s better now, and Skarsgård is proud of her for it, his mother was struggling with addiction at that time. “I became independent very early,” he says. “I would stay with my friends sometimes, and they became a very big, important part of my life.” He might be a father, and someone who is inarguably great at his job, but I can also see, in his eyes, flashes of the same kid who found porn mags in the park. His friend group today is largely made up of the people he met when he was 12. They hung out and grabbed lunch before he met me – not once does he drop the name of a Hollywood superstar compatriot whom he considers a close friend. That means something.

This midpoint in his life – his early teenage years – feels like a version of Bill Skarsgård that is frozen in time, as if the sheen of Södra Latin wore off, and the gloss of Hollywood never stuck. “Some people in my line of work have escaped their homes,” he says. “They grew up in a small town, where nobody understood them, but for me it’s, like, the opposite. I’m still very close to the thing that shaped me, and everything outside of it, the industry, is so flimsy and vain. In New York, I feel like I’m in a prison, you know? America is just the commercialised mecca of everything. But being here keeps me grounded and sane.”

A month after our meeting, Skarsgård will turn 36, tipping into the upper end of his thirties.

“I don’t know where he got these numbers from,” he adds, “but my dad would say, ‘I’ve worked four months out of the year for the past 20 years, which means eight months I’ve been home with you guys.’ And for those eight months, he was fully present. He would drop us off at school, pick us up, and cook meals for us. I never felt like I had a dad that was missing.”

Which reminds him: he’s late to pick his kids up from school. Afterwards, they’ll head home and pack the car, preparing for the drive to the country house for Midsommar with the family. Everyone who can is coming to town to join them. Centuries pass but the Skarsgårds are still seafarers in their own way – “We’re like explorers,” as Bill Skarsgård puts it, his family wandering out into uncharted waters, before coming back, together, to the point where it all started. “Hmm…,” he ponders. “Maybe it is genetic.”