Stellan Skarsgård doesn’t believe in bad guys
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Our guest today, Swedish actor Stellen Skarsgaard, has had a long and interesting career, which only seems to get more interesting with age. Now in his seventies, he's just earned a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the widely acclaimed film Sentimental Value from the Danish Norwegian director Joachim Trier. This surge in Skarsgard's fortunes comes four years after he suffered a stroke, which left him struggling to memorize his lines. He found a workaround, which we'll talk about, and that enabled him to continue to play roles he'd begun in the science fiction movie series Dune and the Star Wars spinoff TV series Andor, as well as the film Sentimental Value. Skarsgard began acting as a teenager, and has appeared in more than a hundred movies, from independent European films like Breaking the Waves and Melancholia, to commercial Hollywood fair, such as The Hunt for Red October, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Mamma Mia.
He's also found time to raise eight children from two marriages. Five of those kids are also professional actors. The best known in the United States are his sons Alexander and Bill. Skardsgard will find out if he's an Oscar winner at the award ceremony march fifteenth. He spoke to me last week from a studio in London.
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