The Northman Interview: Alexander Skarsgård On Filming With Robert Eggers And Anya Taylor-Joy

thegamer.com:

Robert Eggers is one of the most distinctive directors working in Hollywood today, having cultivated a brand of eerie, unsettling, sometimes unexplainable unease in his first two feature films, The Witch and The Lighthouse. The Northman, however, is a major departure. Made with a $90 million budget, it retains Eggers' style but transplants it into the historical action genre, breaking new ground for the director. You can read all about why Eggers went in this direction in my interview with the director here, but star Alexander Skarsgård also has a unique perspective on The Northman.

While Skarsgård has a varied filmography including dark romantic turns in Passing and Big Little Lies, he also has experience as an action lead from the likes of True Blood and The Legend of Tarzan. When I sat down with Skarsgård, I asked him about his experience shooting intense action scenes with a director usually known for intensely intimate movies.

Related: The Northman Review - This Generation’s Braveheart, By Way Of Hamlet And Macbeth

"It's an undertaking that I knew was going to be challenging," he says. "With Robert, it's one thing to do to shoot this way when you're shooting a movie about two characters in a lighthouse. It's a whole different story when you have 300 extras and 50 stuntmen and horses and chickens and Vikings climbing walls, and all the while the camera’s moving with them. I knew it was going to be challenging, but also I just embraced that and was really, really excited that Rob had the guts to try it this way. Because people just don't shoot movies that way. And definitely not action movies. So it entailed a lot of prep, we had to work on those big set pieces for many months before shooting them. Figuring out the