Do we like Alexander Skarsgård?
Our score: 7 out of 10. Clean on harm and decent by every report we found, but the public record of good deeds is thinner than we'd like.
Alexander Skarsgård is a Swedish actor, and to a lot of people he's still the husband from Big Little Lies. That role, the violent Perry, won him a string of awards, and by January 2018 he'd collected his fourth for it. Honestly, the pages we could open say little about his upbringing, so this column is about the record, not the origin story.
His one proper stoush was an awards-night one. When he won at the 2018 SAG Awards, critics said his speech skipped domestic abuse, given the Time's Up moment and the role itself. He joked about who the greatest male actor is, and thanked people, and the criticism followed. Glamour noted he hadn't responded and that he'd spoken against domestic abuse in earlier interviews. It reads as a missed moment, not a pattern.
On the harm test, we found nothing nasty. In a 2018 Elle UK interview he called Hollywood's double standard for women “disgusting” and said he is “100 percent” a feminist. In 2015 he sailed on Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise to make a comedy series for its Save the Arctic campaign. We found no court cases, lawsuits or misconduct allegations, though that only covers what we could find.
His recent work doesn't throw up any red flags either. Pillion is a queer BDSM love story that he made with an intimacy coordinator on set, and he told Screen Daily the scenes were about having a narrative. When his Zurich remarks about his background were read as a coming out, he told Variety it was “definitely not an intended statement”. He kept the focus on the film, and that's his call.
Then there's Wicker, a darkly funny fairy tale from Sundance with Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage and Elizabeth Debicki. He plays the straw husband in a suit built with Weta Workshop. The London premiere is where the clear plastic shoes got him roasted, with one comedian saying he gasped in horror. That's fashion crime, and the only sort he's been accused of.
The good stuff is real but thin. The Arctic trip fits a man who backed a climate campaign with his time, and his feminist comments sit well beside it. We couldn't verify any big charity commitments from reliable sources, so we won't invent them. Put it together and he's a safe pick, short of a saint, who wore terrible shoes once.