Swedish Chameleon Gets His Spotlight

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Tribute nights at SBIFF propose, in the ideal scenario, to make a tribute subject more or less “fully known,” to quote the Stephen Colbert shtick. And one easy access summation comes in the form of the crafty Mike McGee’s ever-impressive montages of clips preceding the tribute portion of the evening.

For Stellan Skarsgård’s montage moment, last night at the Arlington, the package was particularly revealing of the seasoned Swedish actor’s remarkable, chameleonic range. Of course, the timing of Skarsgård’s Montecito Award appearance was his stellar performance in one of the year’s great films, Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, which earned him his first and long-awaited Oscar nomination. But Skarsgård’s filmography, with more than 120 titles, not including television work, reveals a dizzying plethora of roles, from heroic to villainous and all shades between. 

A short list of his best-known works goes something like this: Breaking the Waves (and other Lars von Trier films), Good Will Hunting, the evil bad guy in Girl with a Dragon Tattoo, films in the Dune, Thor, and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises, and much more. After Wednesday’s montage, he told the moderator, Variety’s Anne Thompson, “I haven’t seen some of those films in years.” After a beat, he added, in his dryly comic way, “I’m very old.”

Although the 74-year-old actor is moving ahead with his stellar career and has reached a new pinnacle with Sentimental Value, he suffered a stroke several years ago, between the two editions of Dune. He commented that he has trouble remembering lines, requires prompters, which disrupts his sense of rhythm, and has difficulty accessing language as easily as before. That probably explains why he said, early in the evening, that before he was born, “my father knocked up my wife — I mean, my mother.” 

Skarsgård has appeared in films in Scandinavia, Hollywood, and elsewhere. He mentioned that when appearing in Norwegian and Danish films, “I only speak Swedish, which other Scandinavian countries understand. When acting in Norway, they think I’m Norwegian, with a speech impediment.”

It was in the innovative Danish director Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves that his film career broke into a higher gear, and he later appeared in the Dane’s films Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), Melancholia (2011), Nymphomaniac (2013), and the series The Kingdom. Taylor asked about the meaning of Nymphomaniac, and the actor answered, “It’s all about digressions, and sexuality, of course. He wanted to see how patient the audience could be with all these digressions.” He added, with a sly grin, “He later called me and said, ‘My next film will be a porno that I’d like you to play the lead in. But you will not get to fuck in it. I will show your dick at the end. It will be very floppy.’”

On a more serious note, he discussed the political ramifications of the TV series Chernobyl, in which he played a significant role. “We are very adaptable to authoritarian regimes. Even facts don’t matter anymore, just because we think that power wants us to think in a certain way. It was obvious for the Nazis. It was obvious the Soviet Union, where the system is so corrupt, that people are afraid of being caught and to start to falsify even the nuclear power safety rules.”

He stopped himself, presumably to keep from reflecting on the current regime in the White House, saying, “I’m not going to go further with that….” 

 

He hit a substantial and emotionally nuanced stride in the winter of his career with his work in Sentimental Value. He plays a veteran film director, Gustav Borg, who is attempting to weave his way back to his daughters and make peace with his troubled family past — with a film project, his strongest mode of communication. 

Skarsgård noted that his character “tries to reach out and tries to be emotionally adult and capable with his daughters. He says the wrong thing, he does the wrong thing. But at the same time, he is very comfortable as a director.

[Click to zoom] Actor Josh Brolin presents the Montecito Award to Stellan Skarsgård at SBIFF 2026
| Credit: Ingrid Bostrom

“Many directors I know are like that, and many artists,” he continued. “They’re obsessed by their art, and their art is also a way to find refuge, because they can perform it in a controlled way. It’s more difficult to patrol the emotional life of the family.” Josh Brolin, the actor now based in Santa Barbara who performed with Skarsgård in Dune, did the honors of presenting the trophy and expressed his awe for the older actor. “In this era of Instagram gratification,” Brolin commented, “Skarsgård continues to remind us what happens when a performance creeps into your psyche and stays, with churning wet clay inside. It maybe slightly changes your perception of how you might view the world, or at least your little bubble differently. A real actor is what I think they call it.”