If you had the chance to spend 10 minutes with Alexander Skarsgård (Eric Northman) would you? The UK based Evening Standard‘s reporter Hannah Nathanson recently received such a chance to talk with Alexander about his current projects and other things such as 50 Shades of Gray, Scandinavia’s other greatest export besides TV, and a little about his childhood.
Skarsgård has been up in Vancouver shooting the film Hidden in which he plays a man who has been hidden in a bomb shelter for the past year. He calls the experience of doing so intense, having been forced to go on a diet of kale salads, protein and water. True Blood co-star Kristin Bauer van Straten (Pamela Swynford de Beaufort) engaged in some goodnatured ribbing toward him when the actor opened up about the diet during at press conference at Roma Fiction Fest last month.
Outside of acting, Alexander was asked to discussed his participation in the new Calvin Klein Encounter fragrance ads which he described as wild:
”It was wild and very gripping. We filmed in this weird dungeon with lots of sweat and leather, so it was very sexy and film noir.”
As for the infamous 50 Shades of Gray novel, he still hasn’t read the books but says that he is flattered people want him to be a part of the film and he’s interested to see what all of the excitement is about.
When asked if there was a certain smell that reminded him of home, Alexander said that for him it’s sausage:
“It’s not very sexy, but there was a sausage factory near my house in South Stockholm so I remember the foul smell going to school every morning. It wasn’t the smell of a nice cooked sausage.”
Scandinavia has put out several well known television series for export in the form of the Killing here in the US and another called the Bridge. But it is the pacemaker, Alexander says, that is its other greatest export because of how many lives it has saved.
The actor states he won’t know if people will grow tired of vampires but if you ask him when he’s 58 and True Blood has wrapped he might know then. Evening Standard closed its interview session by asking what motivated Alexander to agree to Lady Gaga’s Paparazzi video several years back. It was fun at the time apparently:
“It was her first album and was very odd. She wasn’t the girl that people know today. I mean she was about 17, so I didn’t really know who she was, but in the video I try to push her off a balcony and she comes back to poison me. It sounded like a fun thing to do.”
Source: Standard.co.uk- “10 minutes with Alexander Skarsgård”
Image Credit: Pacific Coast News
