Alexander Skarsgard Heats up Blackbook
Geez, Skarsgard is everywhere! With True Blood hurtling toward its season finale, Melancholia screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, and Straw Dogs opening in theaters all within days of each other, Alexander Skarsgard is the man to interview! His latest conquest is Blackbook where he takes the writer on a tour of the True Blood soundstage on the last day of filming season 4 and talks about his role in Straw Dogs, one that may rock the boat among his fans.
Warning: Blackbook (actually, more like Alex and Stephen Moyer) spills some spoilers on the season finale, so don’t read if you don’t want to know!
“Use your phone and shine a light over here,” says Alexander Skarsgård, whose indefinitely appropriated Southern twang echoes off the walls inside one of the many vast stages at Hollywood Center Studios in Los Angeles. It’s True Blood’s final day of production before the show’s annual hiatus (they’ll reconvene in November for season five), and the near-empty lot we’ve been wandering feels like a schoolhouse abandoned by its students for the summer. Most of the cast and crew have driven out to Malibu this afternoon to film the pyre-heavy final scene of the HBO series’ fourth season, but Skarsgård and his costar Stephen Moyer have been directed here to re-shoot a close-up. “Follow me,” he says as we edge closer to the darkest part of the hangar-size room.
“I wish I could find a fucking light switch,” he adds, before eventually flipping one. The chamber we’re in—done up like a dank basement with black columns and intimations of evil—suddenly becomes awash in the glow of overhead lights. “This is where I tortured Lafayette,” he says with a satisfied grin, referring to the show’s second season, in which his character Eric Northman, the sheriff of Area 5, chained Nelsan Ellis’ drug-abusing, cross-dressing fry cook to a post. He waves me through another door into what looks like a nightclub filled with barstools, dusty liquor bottles, and a poster of a vampiric George W. Bush. “Welcome,” he says with exaggerated gravitas, “to Fangtasia!”
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