Stellan Skarsgård as John River

"I did BBC One's River because I was jealous of actresses.
Male roles are always about hiding emotions - it's always what's going on underneath. While women in their roles always get the opportunity to show everything."
Stellan Skarsgård



On John River:

"What first attracted me to River was the poetry - the warmth and love of human beings that runs through the script. Even though there’s a lot of sadness, that humanity makes it bearable.
But on another level, what really interested me was the way the male characters are written. Male characters that are created by women can be badly written. And female characters are usually very badly written by men. Because when you write about the other sex, you usually go back to some sexual fantasy about them, not who they really are.
But Abi Morgan’s writing is about a human being, it doesn’t matter if they have a penis or not. Male characters are usually written with a sort of contained emotional life, while actresses always get the opportunity to tell all their feelings all the time. So for the first time in my career I got the opportunity to be as an actress is, and show everything. And I really enjoyed that."
Stellan Skarsgård

"I've worked with Lars von Trier on many films, and there's always a female character that's like an open wound - everything just pours out of this person. For the first time I saw a male role that had that opportunity."
Stellan Skarsgård

"I've been offered some of those police stories in Sweden, but we do so many - Wallander and Beck and whatever it is. Some of them are very good and you probably see the best ones [in the UK]."
Stellan Skarsgård

"But there's so much of it and I'm not interested in police stories. I'm not interested in 'who did it' - this being a much more internal story about a man, and his difficulties in surviving in a reality that doesn't accept people that are different, is more interesting to me."
Stellan Skarsgård

“He (Lars von Trier) doesn’t have to show me a script for me to say yes, but there’s one role in all his films and it’s a woman. She’s an open wound bleeding all over the screen, then there are some stupid men around. Actors are meant to be manly and hide everything, but River allowed me to be actor and actress.”
Stellan Skarsgård



On England, the U.S., and Scandinavia:

“If you look at the stories, they’re pretty banal. It’s the cultural difference that’s exciting. Lisbeth Salander is a fantastic character, with a child’s vulnerability but a hardness and coldness that makes her stronger than any man. Thanks to Scandinavia being the most emancipated part of the world, you have female characters that are very hard to invent in a more repressed, sexist society like Britain. I heard they lit Tower Bridge pink because they had an heir that didn’t have a penis.”
Stellan Skarsgård

"I was brought up an Anglophile. But you [the English] seem to be extremely happy with the social differences in this country…[and] it’s going to get worse. What has made the development of society possible is not greed, but compassion and empathy – otherwise we’d still be running around killing each other in the f***ing jungle."
Stellan Skarsgård

“Somebody from the studio suggested changing the name of Professor Lambeau [Skarsgard’s character in Good Will Hunting]. I said, I’ll change it to Svensson if all the American actors take American names like Sitting Bull …. What is an English name, anyway?”
Stellan Skarsgård

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