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FAR TOO OFTEN, today’s Hollywood hunks deny their beauty to play a cavalcade of schmucks, freaks, and losers with funny accents, hiding in prosthetics because they think this will transform them into “serious” actors in the public eye. But this strategy doesn’t always pay off. Leo spent two hours and 42 minutes running around in a plaid bathrobe and messy man bun only to lose the Best Actor Oscar to Michael B. Jordan, who played a smokeshow vampire with a spit kink (and his identically hot twin).
It’s best not to underestimate someone with undeniable sex appeal and unquenchable blood lust, as Alexander Skarsgård knows all too well from his years playing Eric Northman on True Blood. The role not only made Stockholm’s native son a household name in America, but an instantly recognizable sex symbol. Not that he needed much help from Hollywood. Skarsgård is 6’4″ of muscle with anime bone structure. He’s 50, but doesn’t age in human years. He makes us mere mortal men all look, and feel, lesser than. The scion of Swedish acting royalty comes from a place where everyone kind of looks like that, yet he’s been named Sweden’s Sexiest Man Alive five times.
“After my first job, I was on a stupid ‘hot hunky hot list’ and then people didn’t take me seriously,” Skarsgård told the The Sunday Times in 2022. “If you want characters with depth but have been labelled ‘a dude who takes his shirt off’, you’re not going to get those offers.” At the time, he was promoting The Northman, for which he’d packed on 25 additional pounds of muscle to play a Viking warrior prince, and spent most of his screen time shirtless, delivering the exact sort of performance that theoretically typecast him in the first place.
From scanning his filmography, it’s clear that at a certain point, Skarsgård decided to lean into his lot in life as an unapologetic sex symbol. Over the past two decades, he’s slowly gravitated toward roles that don’t attempt to soften or normalize his hunkiness, portraying a diverse range of characters who all just happen to be ridiculously hot in films and television shows that play with his beauty, what it means, and how it messes with the rest of us.
In his latest, Wicker, Skarsgård plays a literal object of desire, the purest distillation of his on-screen persona as a sweet and (still, somehow) hot magical dildo who loves doing chores and adores his fishmonger wife (Olivia Colman), causing hysteria in a village full of dumbasses who have no idea how to treat or fuck a woman. In other words, he’s Alexander Skarsgård.
1) The Male Model: Zoolander & Zoolander 2 (2001 & 2016)
Photo credit: Paramount
Ben Stiller’s comedy classic is built around the premise that Jerry Stiller’s son and Owen Wilson and Benedict Cumberbatch are male models. A fun piece of trivia is Skarsgård was inserted as one of Derek’s United Nations of conventionally attractive roommates. Baby faced Meekus is hilariously bad at bitchy teenage girl humor and loves orange mocha frappuccinos. He gets in a gasoline fight in the first installment that results in a fiery death, but returns for the sequel in a brief cameo, perfectly cast as the original man.
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2) The Vamp: True Blood (2008–2014)
Photo credit: HBO
Skarsgård became a star when this show was a very good gothic soap opera people held in the same regard as many of the HBO classics that were on at the time, but it has faded from memory due to completely spinning off its axis in later seasons. But his role as Eric Northman, a hot, menacing Viking prince who carries himself with regal arrogance when he first washes up in Louisiana, remains an indelible performance. He’s a kind of Magneto/Lestat figure, who believes in vampire superiority and humans primarily as food, then slowly reforms.
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3) The Manliest Man: Straw Dogs (2011)
Photo credit: Sony
This remake of the 1971 Sam Peckinpah classic is a bad, hamfisted W. Bush era culture war movie (released three years late), in which James Marsden, as a pretentious, Harvard-educated lib Hollywood screenwriter, is pitted against Skarsgård, who plays a God-, guns-, country music and football-loving redneck. But the use of Skarsgård is symbolically correct: As a rugged man’s man who works with his hands, hulks over Marsden’s effete snob, and represents all Marsden’s shortcomings and insecurities.
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4) The Charismatic Cult Leader: The East (2013) & The Stand (2020)
Photo credit: Paramount+
Two roles that trade on Skarsgård’s magnetism, casting him as cult leaders. One is Benji, an eco-terrorist ringleader in The East, which was overshadowed by Kelly Reichardt’s superior eco-terrorist anti-thriller Night Moves from the same year, but is also very good. Skarsgård begins the film as a hirsute, politically radical Jim Morrison. The role generally strips a lot of his raw tools away but he proves he still has the juice, running his operations with the certitude of a self-righteous zealot, taking full advantage of his implicit understanding that everyone will do what he says because they all want to fuck him.
That same energy is twisted evil in the less-than-stellar and largely forgotten Paramount+-produced adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand from 2020. Skarsgård is having a blast here, clearly tapped in and comfortable with the cheap, fatty, made for TV vibes. He plays Randall Flagg, an infamous demonic anti-Christ figure in King lore, who also swaggers around making dark, grand pronouncements because he knows everyone is dreaming about him…and wants to fuck him.
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5) The Mythological Figure: The Legend of Tarzan (2016) & The Northman (2022)
Photo credit: Focus Features
These are the two loin cloth roles that make best use of Skarsgård as physical clay. The first was a bid for a franchise at a more conventional phase of Skarsgard’s career. It’s a horribly problematic text about a Lawrence of Arabia raised by gorillas in the Congo, released at what was probably the latest moment in modern history anyone could’ve possibly thought this IP could still work in any context. And yet, Christoph Waltz is the bad guy, Margot Robbie is Jane, Samuel L. Jackson turns in a peak performance. It doesn’t really matter, because the movie doesn’t work. The one very funny, deeply horny beat, however, is Tarzan and Jane’s meet cute, when Robbie happens upon a still uncivilized, dirt and grime covered Skarsgård in the jungle, who emerges from the brush, towers over her, then sniffs her from head to toe, which is a shameless, incredibly erotic romantasy/soft porn scenario.
The Northman on the other hand, rules, and might just be the best movie in director Robert Eggers’s burgeoning and impressive filmography. I still wonder to this day how it wasn’t a bigger deal (likely the mid 2022 Covid-era release date, but still). Skarsgård leaves it all on screen in this folklore epic, near naked in the snow, in the mud, in the waves, shredded and extremely believable as a raider scaling ramparts with a battle axe, lurching through villages as they’re pillaged and burned.
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6) The Alpha Scumbag: Big Little Lies (2017-2019)
Photo credit: HBO
“Biggest scumbag Alexander Skarsgård has ever played” is quite a distinction, but it has to be Perry Wright, a manipulative, abusive, domineering, womanizing monster who entwines magnetic, toxic sex with serial spousal abuse in David E. Kelly’s Shakespearean, rich, white wine-momsploitation thriller. He plays one of the few believable on-screen partners Nicole Kidman has ever had, arm candy who wears the fuck out of tailored suits. He’s a striking contrast to the show’s other husbands, all older boring, brunette, beta boys. He’s a perfect-from-a-distance husband and father, the on-paper exemplar of a certain anachronistic masculinity, and also the epitome of damaged male evil. Which is why Perry’s Orient Express style group murder is the climax of the first season of the show.
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7) The Tech Demigod (The Odin of Codin): Succession (2018-2023)
Photo credit: HBO
“Privacy, pussy, pasta” is the mantra of the hoodie loving, misogynistic, Aspergery magnate Lukas Matsson. On Succession he’s the Roy family’s Phil Leotardo, a Swedish Zuckerberg with a dash of Musk who is smarter, richer, and (figuratively and literally) more powerful than the siblings. He towers over them throughout the penultimate and final seasons of the show, besting and torturing them at every turn, eventually buying their birthright company and denying their role in its future in any meaningful way. When Logan dies, Skarsgård steps in as daddy to us all. The most withering insult in the entire series might be Matsson letting his guard down for a moment and informing Kendall, with utter disdain, “You’re a tribute band.”
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8) The Leather Daddy: Pillion (2025)
Photo credit: A24
A highly unlikely proposition. Harry Melling (who most probably still know best from his role as Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films) is Colin, a nebbishy mama’s boy with an aptitude for devotion in a barbershop quartet. Colin’s meetcute is delivering a back alley blowjob with little preamble to Skarsgård’s Ray, the hung final boss of leather daddies in the sweetest BDSM rom-com since Secretary. As Ray, Skarsgård communicates almost entirely via squinting, grunting, monosyllabic responses, and direct commands, yet is a completely alluring masculine ideal. His hobbies are waxing his motorcycle, watching shit on his phone while he eats, wrestling in assless unitards as foreplay, and reading Knausgaard. You can smell the sandalwood, cedar and tobacco wafting off the screen.
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9) The Sex Machine: Murderbot (2025)
Photo credit: Apple TV
In which Skarsgård finally, inevitably plays a robot. This is a darkly comedic, but also occasionally saccharine, Apple TV+ series about a Wall-E war machine. His character, known only as Murderbot, has found a way to disable the guardrails that would otherwise force him to obey protocols programmed by the nefarious Weyland-Yutani style corporation who created him, and uses this freedom to consume our garbage TV shows. Murderbot expresses a professed disinterest in humanity, and hates eye contact; It’s a weird, flat, funny performance that ultimately lands halfway between Pedro Pascal in The Mandalorian and Peter Weller in Robocop. Skarsgård is a completely believable robot in a show that also serves as a metaphor for autism.
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