The Northman actor Alexander Skarsgård: "It was physically and mentally the most difficult job I've ever had"
Robert Eggers' The Northman tells an epic Viking tale – a vast, brutal, uncompromising saga of cold-blooded revenge. To capture such intense scenes, the cast and crew headed to Northern Ireland, with forays to Iceland, for filming. The result was a shoot more intense than anything lead actor Alexander Skarsgård had done before.
"It was physically and mentally the most difficult job I’ve ever had, but also the most rewarding," Skarsgård tells Total Film for the new issue of the magazine, featuring The Northman on the cover. "The days were really long and hard, and we were out in the mud, and up on these mountaintops with the wind and the cold. The week prior, I was working on the television show Succession, on which I play a tech billionaire in a villa on Lake Como. So I literally went from playing one of the richest dudes on the planet in a crazy, beautiful villa, surrounded by yachts and helicopters and luxury, and got on a plane and flew to Iceland to get shackled and dragged through the mud. It was definitely a waking-up moment and a humbling experience."
Eggers insists that while many of the huge guys playing Viking warriors struggled, The Queen Gambit's Anya Taylor-Joy, who plays the female lead, was a trooper. "Aw, Rob," she responds affectionately when TF passes this along. "I’m not a complainer, and Rob and Jarin know that, but there was one day when the mud was up to my knees, and it had frozen overnight, and I’m barefoot. It had got to a point where I think just squeaked out, ‘Please!’ And they were like, ‘Oh, OK, it’s bad. It’s really bad. We need to get this done. If Anya’s saying, ‘Can we please roll? I can’t stand here any longer...'"
But there is, of course, a point to all this movie masochism. "Because of
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