Stellan Skarsgård posing on the red carpet. (Declan McFarland / Daily Nexus)
On Feb. 11, prolific actor and star of “Sentimental Value” Stellan Skarsgård was presented the Montecito Award at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival for his great contribution to film. Skarsgård’s “Dune” co-star Josh Brolin presented the illustrious award to the film legend.
Skarsgård is nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards for his role as Gustav Borg in “Sentimental Value.” He is the favorite to win the award, which would mark the first Oscar in his multi-decade career.
Prior to the event, fans lined the barricades outside the Arlington Theatre as the actor arrived at the venue. After taking photos with the crowd, Skarsgård merrily walked the red carpet for the ceremony.
On the carpet he revealed it was the director of “Sentimental Value,” Joachim Trier, that drew him to the project.
“I’ve seen [Trier’s] films, I’ve seen him develop, and he is exceptional,” Skarsgård said in an interview with the Daily Nexus.
After the carpet buzz, patrons, fans and press alike meandered inside the Arlington Theatre and all found their seats before the ceremony properly began.
Walking out with a martini in hand, Roger Durling, the Executive Director of the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (SBIFF), earned many rounds of applause. He gave praise to Skarsgård as he described the night as a “victory lap” for the veteran actor.
Before he left the podium, Durling introduced the moderator for the evening, Anne Thompson. Thompson, the Editor at Large for IndieWire, gave quick remarks on Skarsgård’s various and outstanding performances. Discussing his ability to perform brilliantly as vastly different characters she remarked how Skarsgård is able to “move freely” between the roles.
After a montage highlighting Skarsgård’s career and notable performances, the Swedish-born actor took the stage to thunderous applause from an enthusiastic audience.
Thompson touched on Skarsgård’s illustrious filmography. “We can’t look at all the movies you’ve done,” she told the honoree.
“Well most of them I haven’t seen in years. I’m really old!” Skarsgård replied, which gained a laugh with the audience.
This was the first moment of the night where Skarsgård brought levity to the interview, balancing his enormous catalogue and skill with humility and humor. Throughout the conversation with Thompson, he never took himself seriously, credited others more than himself for success and often gave hilarious anecdotes.
Recounting his childhood and his upbringing, Skarsgård had a humorous slip-up.
“[My father] knocked up my wife,” he said, before quickly realizing his mistake and correcting to “My mother!” while the audience joined him in laughter.
The star also showed his clear love for the profession. Skarsgård began acting at 16, becoming popular in Sweden when he starred in the 1968 miniseries “Bombi Bitt och jag.”
“[Acting] was a new freedom I found,” he said.
When discussing this quick rise to fame, he credited the small number of Swedish television programs people were able to watch in 1968, not solely his skill.
“We only had one channel, black and white, driven by steam,” Skarsgård remarked.
Skarsgård credited 1996’s “Breaking the Waves” as his film breakout role. The film, directed by Lars von Trier, won the Grand Prix at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival and went on the awards circuit after.
“It was for a bigger audience, and gave me more jobs here in America,” Skarsgård said.
The actor also took time to praise von Trier. “He gives you so much room to play … to release something in the actor that is unplanable. It’s the irrationality of life, and for that to come through [the actor] has to have a certain amount of freedom,” Skarsgård said.
The actor discussing his career in film and television. (Declan McFarland / Daily Nexus)
Skarsgård has often been praised for his ability to feel natural in any role, shapeshifting into the character he plays and making the reality of the world he acts in come alive on the screen. The actor explained that his ability to do this didn’t come from “his tools” from years of acting and learning, but from his ability to hide them from the audience.
Showcasing his genre-spanning range, Skarsgård talked about his work on the movie musical “Mamma Mia!” where he plays a potential father of Amanda Seyfried’s character.
Discussing his role in the ABBA jukebox musical, Skarsgård joked, “I was really scared … they called ME to do a musical? I can’t sing, I can’t dance.”
Skarsgård described the consistent ABBA-filled rehearsals and filming as a kind of torture.
“Can you imagine a month and a half working everyday to ‘Voulez-Vous?’” he asked the audience. “You wake up in the middle of the night Voulez-Vous!”
Contrasting the lighthearted fun of “Mamma Mia!,” Skarsgård spoke on his performance in David Fincher’s “The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo,” an action-thriller. Skarsgård said he enjoyed David Fincher’s directorial style of filming each scene at least 20 times on the set of the film, as it gives the actor time for his performance to become more “believable.”
“To make a turn of a feeling takes time if you’re not used to it. So you have to oil it up. You become much more agile in terms of emotions and much lighter and it becomes much better,” Skarsgård said.
The discussion highlighted Skarsgård’s extensive television career by showing two clips from “Chernobyl” and “Andor.” Skarsgård reflected on what he learned about human nature during his time working on “Chernobyl” which recounts the events of the nuclear power plant disaster in Ukraine in 1986.
“We are very adoptable to authoritarian regimes and we compromise very quickly with everything, even facts don’t matter anymore, just because we think that the power wants us to think a certain way,” Skarsgård said.
Skarsgård also revealed a recent hardship during his acting career — between working on Denis Villeneuve’s first and second “Dune” movies, the actor suffered a stroke, making it difficult to remember his lines. During the filming of “Dune 2,” Skarsgård had to wear an ear piece feeding him the lines. Despite the stroke, both directors he was working with at the time were happy to make accommodations for Skarsgård.
“I called Tony Gilroy from “Andor” and I called Denis Villeneuve and I said this has happened and we might not be able to do it, and both of them said, ‘Come in, we make it work,’” Skarsgård said.
The conversation concluded with discussing “Sentimental Value,” where Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, a successful director who is trying to reconcile his relationships with his daughter after the death of his ex-wife. As Skarsgård describes, Borg is “clumsy” when expressing himself to his daughters, he consistently says and does the wrong thing. The film explores the messiness of family relationships through subtle, yet heavy performances.
Skarsgård said this mirrors a lot of the directors and artists he has worked with because they find “refuge” in their art as they can control every aspect of the world they are creating.
“It’s more difficult to control the emotional life of a family, and that’s what scares them,” Skarsgård said.
Brolin then presented Skarsgård with the Montecito Award with a speech illustrating his immense career of performances that truly move audiences.
Josh Brolin presenting Stellan Skarsgård with the award. (Declan McFarland / Daily Nexus)
“Stellan Skarsgård continues to remind us what happens when a performance creeps into your psyche and stays with you, churning wet clay inside of you, changing slightly your perception of how you indeed might view the world, or at least your little bubble differently,” Brolin said.
“A real actor, I think they call it. They are few and far between,” he added.
Brolin went on to praise Skarsgård’s mastery of restraint for his performance in “Sentimental Value.”
“The job of Stellan’s was so difficult. The restraint, the having to desensitize, the knowing as an actor that you’re the problem on the set and then to be sensitive within all that is incredible,” Brolin said. “That’s the toughest role, and a role that Stellan navigated with true mastery.”
Ending the night with nothing else to say, Skarsgård simply accepted the award with a “Thank you,” walking off the Arlington Theatre stage to applause from the audience.
The 98th Academy Awards will take place on March 15, where Skarsgård is currently nominated for Best Supporting Actor.
This article appeared in the 2/19 print edition of the Daily Nexus
