Interview Magazine Gets to the Soul of Alexander Skarsgard

The June/July issue of Interview magazine has a terrific sit down with True Blood star Alexander Skarsgard, accompanied by some provocative photos. Here’s an excerpt from Alex’s interview with Win Butler:

BUTLER: In music, a lot of times, you’ll take different influences and then kind of end up combining them in strange ways. Does that ever happen for you as an actor?

SKARSGÅRD: In a weird way, I always play myself, just through different mirrors. If I read a script and I don’t connect with a character, if I can’t find the character on the page in my soul, then I’m not going to be able to do a good job.

BUTLER: There’s always a thing with actors where people think they know you because they’ve seen you play a character for so long. It’s different from what happens with musicians. I know that when I was a teenager and I was in New York, you’d recognize someone from a film and be like, I think I know this person because you know their face. How do you deal with that? The small amount of it that I’ve had to deal with drives me crazy.

SKARSGÅRD: Well, I think that meeting fans who feel like they know you and they know everything about you is actually very flattering. It means a lot to know that what you’re doing actually means something to someone. But the thing that I feel to be a problem potentially is that you become that character, that in the industry, people associate it too closely with who you are and what you can do. I do get a lot of scripts sent to me where they basically want me to play Eric from True Blood, but just a different name in a different movie. That’s not interesting to me. I don’t want to play a character that I’ve played for four years on a television show, change the name, and make him a zombie instead of a vampire.

BUTLER: You either need lots of hits or no hits. The middle ground is not good.

SKARSGÅRD: No, it’s not good at all. But that’s a problem in Hollywood because producers want to pigeonhole you. They say, “All right, this is what works, this actor in this type of role.” And when someone says, “Let’s put him in a comedy instead,” they’re like, “No, no. He’s the mysterious bad guy. You can’t do that.” But I assume that 99.7 percent of actors want to play different characters in different types of projects. That’s kind of the reason you become an actor. It’s not much fun to play the same character in 25 different movies or plays. There’s got to be something new, something fresh. I want to almost be intimidated when I embark on a journey. I wouldn’t say there’s a fear, but I do get slightly ner- vous in the beginning when that happens, and I like that feeling. That triggers me a lot.

BUTLER: I think failure is underrated.

SKARSGÅRD: Failure is awesome. There’s a Beckett quote, where he said, “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail better.” I love that quote. I think that’s what it’s all about. Failure is definitely underrated. Just fail again. Fail better.

Read the rest of Alex’s interview when this issue hits newsstands in New York on June 3 and nationwide June 7.