Stellan Skarsgård would be the first to admit that being a father to eight children — most of whom have followed in his footsteps to become actors — hasn’t always been easy. But it was particularly tough when they chose not to join the family business.
The Sentimental Value star recently sat down with his eldest son, fellow acclaimed actor Alexander Skarsgård, for a lengthy discussion about family legacy and their respective careers, including Alexander’s time as a child actor and his later decision to quit and join the military.
The Pillion actor abandoned his burgeoning career after starring in the 1989 television film Hunden som log (The Dog That Smiled) when he was 13 and eventually decided to pursue a naval career. Although he’s said before that his father supported him, during their new chat for Variety‘s “Actors on Actors” series, Stellan asked if Alexander made the choice to deliberately revolt and tick him off.
“You went into the military — did you do that in opposition to me, to provoke me?” he said.
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Taking a moment to think it over, Alexander replied, “Looking back, I don’t think it was an act of rebellion against you. 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.”
“I felt f—ed,” Stellan said, to which Alexander responded, “You’re a tremendous actor, Father, because I never felt that.”
Stellan noted that he prides himself on not being the kind of father who interferes in his children’s decisions. “But being a military evader like me, it felt like, ‘Oh, wow,'” he said. “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.”
Earlier in their conversation, Alexander recalled getting his first role at 7 years old thanks to “straight-up nepotism” when iconic Swedish actor-director Allan Edwall visited the Skarsgård household and met a young Alexander.
“He probably just asked you… I don’t even think I auditioned for it,” Alexander recalled. “I didn’t want to be an actor. I’m still trying to figure it out — what do I do when I grow up?”
Alexander admitted that he didn’t walk away from his early roles thinking he wanted to act for the rest of his life.
“My dream was for my family to be normal and fit in and be like everybody else’s family,” he confessed to his father in the interview. “For you to have a briefcase, that would’ve been fantastic, rather than a weird tote bag that you found in India. Most people in our family are artists — a lot of eccentric, big personalities that I loved. But the early teens, bringing friends over was always like, ‘Oh, God,’ because I wanted it to be like everyone else’s household.”
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It isn’t the first time Alexander has discussed his desire for a “normal” life.
During an appearance on Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s Armchair Expert podcast over the summer, the Murderbot star explained that his brief period as a teen star made him “incredibly self-conscious.”
“My confidence was just down the drain,” he recalled. “I remember being 13, 14, and if a girl showed a little bit of interest in me, I was like, ‘She’s just a fan of the movie. That’s it.’ It just crushed me. I was like, ‘This is terrible. And I’ve done one 50-minute made-for-TV movie. I don’t want to keep doing this.'”
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“Even though my dad was an actor and my younger brother [Gustaf], when he was 5, 6, he was adamant about, ‘I’m gonna be an actor’ … I wasn’t,” he continued. “I’d done a couple of odd jobs here and there, but it wasn’t like I was pursuing it. It just kinda happened. It wasn’t a difficult decision, because, again, I was like, ‘I don’t want to be an actor anyways. I just want to drive a Saab.’ So I just kind of stopped doing it.”
When Alexander eventually returned to acting, he attended drama school in New York before booking his first part as an adult: the small but memorable role of Meekus, one of Derek Zoolander’s fellow male models, in the 2001 comedy Zoolander. And the rest is history.