In taking on the role of a filmmaker in his latest movie, Stellan Skarsgård sniffed a chance at payback.
“I mean, what an opportunity for revenge,” the Swedish actor said, his eyes lighting up.
Sprinkle an idiosyncrasy here, a mannerism there, soaked up from seven decades on set. Few, if any, other actor can say they’ve worked with as iconic and eclectic a range of directors as Steven Spielberg, Lars von Trier, Denis Villeneuve and Ingmar Bergman, after all. But no, he clarified; if there was anything in his performance pulled from real life, it was “probably unconscious.”
Skarsgård was concentrating on a bigger question: Who was Gustav Borg, the Scandi auteur and catalyst of the Cannes-winning family drama, “Sentimental Value”? The character was, Skarsgård decided, more than a director. “I see him as an artist – and that’s the problem with him,” he explained.
“The art is a part of him. It’s his identity, and it’s hard to give up a part of that for his personal life … If you compromise too much, he ceases to be him.
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