The Movie Star Hiding in Plain Sight

Look at a list of the highest-grossing actors of all time, and you’ll see a lot of familiar names. The group includes franchise-hopping performers such as Scarlett Johansson, Samuel L. Jackson, and Zoe Saldaña; legacy A-listers such as Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks; and one 74-year-old Swede who has built a bustling, storied career doing a little bit of everything. Stellan Skarsgård, who earned his first Academy Award nomination this year for his role in the Norwegian director Joachim Trier’s family drama Sentimental Value, has been on our screens for decades: He began acting in the late 1960s, before establishing himself as a Hollywood fixture in the mid-’90s. Yet only now has Skarsgård become more than just one of cinema’s most reliable players—he’s also one of its most beloved stars.

The reason for his heightened level of fame could be any number of things. Is it because he’s the dad of an army of talented children, including the actors Alexander, Gustaf, and Bill, who have all settled their own beachheads in American culture? Or is it because of his consistent supporting presence in branded universes such as Marvel, Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Dune? Or are people simply charmed by the avuncular grump he dutifully plays on press tours, where he jokes about the “naughty life” he’s led and pokes fun at the bad films he’s made? Skarsgård has portrayed many a villain, curmudgeon, and sad dad on screen, but he’s just as believable as Mamma Mia’s high-kicking, ABBA-singing sailboat enthusiast.

Now he is potentially going to take home an Oscar that would normally serve as something of a career capper, except that his career shows no signs of slowing down. Instead, Hollywood has only just begun to fully deploy Skarsgård’s potential, giving him a place in the mainstream that he likely could not have predicted for himself. The actor spent the ’70s and ’80s churning away in Swedish TV, theater, and indie cinema, building up name recognition in his home nation. But despite some small but memorable appearances in the U.S. hits The Unbearable Lightness of Being and The Hunt for Red October, he struggled to translate that success outside of Europe. Skarsgård’s eventual international breakthrough was via an unexpected route: He became a close collaborator of the Danish provocateur Lars von Trier, known for creating work that typically divides audiences.

[Read: A deeply personal film, but not in the way you might think]

Breaking the Waves, von Trier’s beautiful and artfully punishing 1996 melodrama, elevated Skarsgård’s image in America from side character to formidable screen presence. The reception is a funny thing to consider, given how arduous the movie is: Breaking the Waves is centered on Bess (played by Emily Watson), a sweet, devoutly religious woman suffering from unspecified mental trauma. Skarsgård plays her husband, Jan, who works on an oil rig and is paralyzed in an industrial accident. Now impotent as a result, Jan pushes Bess to find new lovers and tell him about her dalliances with them, an odyssey that eventually drives Bess to madness. It’s an unrelenting viewing experience, and Skarsgård’s character is both complex and unsympathetic. Yet Breaking the Waves was an art-house sensation, scoring an Oscar nomination for Watson and nudging Skarsgård into contention for big-budget Hollywood roles.

Skarsgård’s career soon split into two separate paths: In the United States, the actor played secondary roles, usually weary, nervy authority figures, such as the stern mentor (Good Will Hunting) and the persnickety scientist (Deep Blue Sea). Rarely did he land a leading part, save for a turn in the 2004 box-office bomb Exorcist: The Beginning. In Scandinavian cinema, meanwhile, he had become a big name. Instead of men on the sidelines, Skarsgård played stiff guys with some moral dimension to them—the troubled military man, the struggling cop. He also was given the chance to play against type, and he demonstrated a range relatively untapped in America. (Take, for instance, some of the characters he portrayed in other von Trier films: a rapist in Dogville; an obnoxious figure adjacent to a woman’s dark sexual odyssey in the two-part epic Nymphomaniac.)

But not much of his oeuvre suggested the more whimsical turn he’d take and maintain in his later years—a shift that really arrived with 2008’s Mamma Mia, in which Skarsgård plays one of three potential fathers to Amanda Seyfried’s character, Sophie. (He was also the one actual Swedish connection to the ABBA music that everyone is singing.) The movie hit big with audiences worldwide, who suddenly saw Skarsgård as the fun older man. He embraced the image, which led to more roles in that vein: a befuddled professor in Thor, its sequels, and two Avengers installments, and a silly, puffed-up duke in Disney’s Cinderella remake. He even parodied the irreverent director Werner Herzog on HBO’s Entourage.

[Read: The sad dads of Hollywood]

His kids’ emergence in the industry around the same time, particularly the chiseled Alexander, helped reinforce this image both on- and off-screen. The eldest Skarsgård wasn’t just another European fixture to slot into a prestige project; he was the venerable head of a thespian family. The patriarch vibe comes out especially in press appearances, during which he is candid, loudly political, and happy to take on sacred cows—he raised some eyebrows of late for critiquing the Swedish filmmaking legend Ingmar Bergman as a “manipulative” Nazi sympathizer. He also participates in interviews with his sons in which he somewhat jokily plays into the Nordic stereotype of the demanding father. With his family in tow, he’s conjured a sense of relatability—as a dad many of us know or have.

Perhaps that’s why Sentimental Value has resonated particularly strongly with awards voters. Skarsgård’s role in the film mirrors many people’s conception of the actor himself: He plays a director whose strained relationship with his children serves as the movie’s dramatic engine; too often, they come second to his artistic pursuits. It’s a strong performance, but if he wins, the award will undoubtedly be partly in recognition of his ever-growing filmography. In fact, Skarsgård’s most compelling performance last year was not in Sentimental Value but in a franchise: the Disney+ Star Wars series Andor, in which he played the two-faced spymaster Luthen Rael. The character captured the twin strengths the actor has cultivated over several decades: Luthen is showy and whimsical in public but steely and ruthless in private, unafraid to sacrifice loved ones for the greater good. Skarsgård switched between these modes with just a flash of teeth or a furrowed brow, quietly reminding viewers that his talents have been hiding in plain sight—he’s an industry veteran who’s still able to surprise us.