“DO YOU KNOW THE WAY TO BELVEDERE CASTLE?”
Bill Skarsgård and I have been walking for an hour and forty-seven minutes, winding our way aimlessly around Central Park on a moody New York City morning in April. Over the bridges, around the baseball fields, past the amphitheater, and through the nature sanctuary. Twice.
Now we’re suddenly facing a middle-aged, brunette woman in workout clothes who’s looking at us expectantly. Neither of us, however, has the faintest idea how to locate Belvedere Castle, a Central Park landmark and former lookout tower completed in 1872 and designed in the style of a miniature, well, castle.
Skarsgård freezes, leaving me to apologize to our fellow park walker for not knowing which way she should head. She hurries along, none the wiser about whom she just met. It’s the first time we’ve interacted with any of the hundred or so people we’ve passed this morning. And while there is an inherent compliment in being asked for directions in Manhattan—who doesn’t hope they pass for a New Yorker?—Skarsgård mainly just seems relieved that it wasn’t a fan making an approach.
It poured down rain all morning, and clouds still hang low over the city, trapping thick, lukewarm air. The gloomy weather somehow feels appropriate given the thirty-three-year-old’s upcoming slate of films. In August, he’ll lead a second—bigger, bloodier, sexier—adaptation of The Crow, among the most hotly anticipated reimaginings in recent memory. And come Christmas, he’ll sink his fangs into audiences with his interpretation of a notorious cinematic monster, Count Orlok, in Nosferatu. Unbothered strolls through the park, in other words, may soon be a thing of the past. “I hope not,” Skarsgård says to the suggestion.
Born and raised in Stockholm, Skarsgård has spent time in Manhattan over the years, but this is his first visit to New York in half a decade. After breaking big in his home country in high school and then heading for Hollywood, he bounced from movie set to movie set and TV show to TV show before eventually settling down again in Stockholm. Along the way, he’s built one of the most curious and compelling catalogs of any actor his age.
Just as he disappears into his Manhattan surroundings today, he disappears completely into his roles, from an evil clown (Pennywise in the behemoth horror series It) to a French Cajun thug (the Marquis in John Wick: Chapter 4) to a profoundly troubled World War II veteran (Willard Russell in Antonio Campos’s The Devil All the Time). Wearing a matching navy set of loose-fitting (but structured) trousers, a quarter-zip sweater, and an even more structured pullover with dark sneakers, he’s a total chameleon despite his six-foot, three-inch frame and bright-green eyes.
But it’s not just his ability to transform that surprises; it’s his desire to embrace such characters at all. Deeply flawed and occasionally even disgusting, these are not the roles that make a man a movie star. That’s okay—Skarsgård is searching for something else.
father, Stellan, broke out in the U. S. nearly thirty years ago, in the midst of an international career that boasts more than a hundred projects— and among them—and has earned him a Golden Globe as well as a suite of And since his second-oldest brother, Gustaf, became the star of every dad’s favorite History-channel show,
