A Reader’s Guide to the Many Sexy Roles of Alexander Skarsgård

The Male Model: Zoolander & Zoolander 2 (2001 & 2016)ParamountBen Stiller’s comedy classic is built around the premise that Jerry Stiller’s son and Owen Wilson and Benedict Cumberbatch are male models. A fun piece of trivia is Skarsgård was inserted as one of Derek’s United Nations of conventionally attractive roommates. Baby faced Meekus is hilariously bad at bitchy teenage girl humor and loves orange mocha frappuccinos. He gets in a gasoline fight in the first installment that results in a fiery death, but returns for the sequel in a brief cameo, perfectly cast as the original man.Watch Zoolander HereWatch Zoolander 2 HereThe Vamp: True Blood (2008–2014)HBOSkarsgård became a star when this show was a very good gothic soap opera people held in the same regard as many of the HBO classics that were on at the time, but it has faded from memory due to completely spinning off its axis in later seasons. But his role as Eric Northman, a sexy, menacing Viking prince who carries himself with regal arrogance when he first washes up in Louisiana, remains an indelible performance. He’s a kind of Magneto/Lestat figure, who believes in vampire superiority and humans primarily as food, then slowly reforms.Watch It HereAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowThe Manliest Man: Straw Dogs (2011)SonyThis remake of the 1971 Sam Peckinpah classic is a bad, hamfisted W. Bush era culture war movie (released three years late), in which James Marsden, as a pretentious, Harvard-educated lib Hollywood screenwriter, is pitted against Skarsgård, who plays a God-, guns-, country music and football-loving redneck. But the use of Skarsgård is symbolically correct: As a rugged man’s man who works with his hands, hulks over Marsden’s effete snob, and represents all Marsden’s shortcomings and insecurities.Watch It HereAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowThe Charismatic Cult Leader: The East (2013) & The Stand (2020)Paramount+Two roles that trade on Skarsgård’s magnetism, casting him as cult leaders. One is Benji, an eco-terrorist ringleader in The East, which was overshadowed by Kelly Reichardt’s superior eco-terrorist anti-thriller Night Moves from the same year, but is also very good. Skarsgård begins the film as a hirsute, politically radical Jim Morrison. The role generally strips a lot of his raw tools away but he proves he still has the juice, running his operations with the certitude of a self-righteous zealot, taking full advantage of his implicit understanding that everyone will do what he says because they all want to fuck him.That same energy is twisted evil in the less-than-stellar and largely forgotten Paramount+-produced adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand from 2020. Skarsgård is having a blast here, clearly tapped in and comfortable with the cheap, fatty, made for TV vibes. He plays Randall Flagg, an infamous demonic anti-Christ figure in King lore, who also swaggers around making dark, grand pronouncements because he knows everyone is dreaming about him…and wants to fuck him.Watch The East HereWatch The Stand HereThe Mythological Figure: The Legend of Tarzan (2016) & The Northman (2022)Focus FeaturesThese are the two loin cloth roles that make best use of Skarsgård as physical clay. The first was a bid for a franchise at a more conventional phase of Skarsgard’s career. It’s a horribly problematic text about a Lawrence of Arabia raised by gorillas in the Congo, released at what was probably the latest moment in modern history anyone could’ve possibly thought this IP could still work in any context. And yet, Christoph Waltz is the bad guy, Margot Robbie is Jane, Samuel L. Jackson turns in a peak performance. It doesn’t really matter, because the movie doesn’t work. The one very funny, deeply horny beat, however, is Tarzan and Jane’s meet cute, when Robbie happens upon a still uncivilized, dirt and grime covered Skarsgård in the jungle, who emerges from the brush, towers over her, then sniffs her from head to toe, which is a shameless, incredibly erotic romantasy/soft porn scenario.The Northman on the other hand, rules, and might just be the best movie in director Robert Eggers’s burgeoning and impressive filmography. I still wonder to this day how it wasn’t a bigger deal (likely the mid 2022 Covid-era release date, but still). Skarsgård leaves it all on screen in this folklore epic, near naked in the snow, in the mud, in the waves, shredded and extremely believable as a raider scaling ramparts with a battle axe, lurching through villages as they’re pillaged and burned.Watch The Legend of Tarzan HereWatch The Northman HereAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowThe Alpha Scumbag: Big Little Lies (2017-2019)HBO“Biggest scumbag Alexander Skarsgård has ever played” is quite a distinction, but it has to be Perry Wright, a manipulative, abusive, domineering, womanizing monster who entwines magnetic, toxic sex with serial spousal abuse in David E. Kelly’s Shakespearean, rich, white wine-momsploitation thriller. He plays one of the few believable on-screen partners Nicole Kidman has ever had, arm candy who wears the fuck out of tailored suits. He’s a striking contrast to the show’s other husbands, all older boring, brunette, beta boys. He’s a perfect-from-a-distance husband and father, the on-paper exemplar of a certain anachronistic masculinity, and also the epitome of damaged male evil. Which is why Perry’s Orient Express style group murder is the climax of the first season of the show.Watch It HereAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowThe Tech Demigod (The Odin of Codin): Succession (2018-2023)HBO“Privacy, pussy, pasta” is the mantra of the hoodie loving, misogynistic, Aspergery magnate Lukas Matsson. On Succession he’s the Roy family’s Phil Leotardo, a Swedish Zuckerberg with a dash of Musk who is smarter, richer, and (figuratively and literally) more powerful than the siblings. He towers over them throughout the penultimate and final seasons of the show, besting and torturing them at every turn, eventually buying their birthright company and denying their role in its future in any meaningful way. When Logan dies, Skarsgård steps in as daddy to us all. The most withering insult in the entire series might be Matsson letting his guard down for a moment and informing Kendall, with utter disdain, “You’re a tribute band.”Watch It HereThe Leather Daddy: Pillion (2025)A24A highly unlikely proposition. Harry Melling (who most probably still know best from his role as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films) is Colin, a nebbishy mama’s boy with an aptitude for devotion in a barbershop quartet. Colin’s meetcute is delivering a back alley blowjob with little preamble to Skarsgård’s Ray, the hung final boss of leather daddies in the sweetest BDSM rom-com since Secretary. As Ray, Skarsgård communicates almost entirely via squinting, grunting, monosyllabic responses, and direct commands, yet is a completely alluring masculine ideal. His hobbies are waxing his motorcycle, watching shit on his phone while he eats, wrestling in assless unitards as foreplay, and reading Knausgaard. You can smell the sandalwood, cedar and tobacco wafting off the screen.Watch It HereAdvertisement - Continue Reading BelowThe Sex Machine: Murderbot (2025)Apple TVIn which Skarsgård finally, inevitably plays a robot. This is a darkly comedic, but also occasionally saccharine, Apple TV+ series about a Wall-E war machine. His character, known only as Murderbot, has found a way to disable the guardrails that would otherwise force him to obey protocols programmed by the nefarious Weyland-Yutani style corporation who created him, and uses this freedom to consume our garbage TV shows. Murderbot expresses a professed disinterest in humanity, and hates eye contact; It’s a weird, flat, funny performance that ultimately lands halfway between Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian and Peter Weller in Robocop. Skarsgård is a completely believable robot in a show that also serves as a metaphor for autism.Watch It HereFlatbush local, former mayor of New York City