Stellan Skarsgard on The Painted Bird, the most shocking film you'll ever see
Stellan Skarsgard in The Painted Bird.
It’s been hailed as both a masterpiece and one of the most relentlessly tough experiences a viewer could sit through. Vaclav Marhoul’s foreign-language drama The Painted Bird is told through the eyes of a lone young Jewish boy in eastern Europe as the latter days of WWII rage. He has been hidden by his family in the countryside amid a mass extermination of Jews.
Adapted from the controversial 1965 novel and filmed in black and white, he meets various characters motivated by fear, hate and a self-interest driven by desperation. It’s a story about how war brutalises people - and it doesn’t shy away in its depiction.
Actor Stellan Skarsgard was familiar with the book, and when he first heard of Marhoul’s plans to film it, he immediately got on board.
“I met him many years ago in the 90s, right after the (Berlin) wall came down. We went out drinking and had a lot of wonderful Czech beer. Several years later, he contacted me and said that he had spent two years to get the rights to commence this book,” said the Swedish actor.
“I knew of the book. I read it many years ago. It’s the kind of film that is not made anymore so I said: ‘I’m on’. It took him another 10 years before he got it made. It was such a dark story. As an arthouse film that is the kind of film they barely make any more that has almost no dialogue. It’s extremely cinematic.”
The movie was shot chronologically over two years so the young protagonist grows up before our eyes. “This is at an age where you can see him grow. He grew physically and mentally mature during the film. His journey from the absolute innocence in the beginning to becoming a hardened person in the end, it’s interesting and it’s important.”
From the film’s opening moments, the boy is subjected to various horrors at the hands of the people who encounter him. It’s a challenging watch even for seasoned arthouse movie goers - at the movie’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival there were several walkouts - though not as many as media reports claimed, said Skarsgard.
Over a lengthy career, Skarsgard has become one of cinema’s most in-demand and versatile actors, mixing the arthouse with the mainstream in the most dramatic of ways. One moment he can be stretching himself on the set of the latest from regular collaborator Lars Von Trier, the next he’s hanging out with Thor and the other Avengers.
Not many actors can lay claim to a CV with projects as diverse as The Painted Bird, Chernobyl and Mamma Mia, I tell him. “Ha ha! Well, I want my Swedish smorgasbord to be rich, which means that I find different joys in doing different things. And doing Mamma Mia, it’s so much fun. It’s like a vacation and you have brilliant actors that are not even bothering about acting, but just about having fun. It’s wonderful.
“And then you go and do something like Chernobyl, which is harder work. It is not hard because it’s dark, because you have fun on the set at the same time. But it’s also something where you feel: ‘Okay, this is an important story to tell. Mamma Mia is not an important story to tell. But there’s no shame in making people happy for two hours.
“I try to avoid doing the same thing twice. I’m also not a personality actor. It’s not me, you see, I’m actually portraying someone else. There are personality actors that are fantastic and they basically play the same character throughout their lives and the situations of the story makes them look differently. To me it’s been important to avoid being perceived as just a certain kind of actor or just a certain kind of type.”
Chernobyl, which won him a Golden Globe earlier this year, saw him star opposite our own Jessie Buckley and Barry Keoghan in the acclaimed series, and he says he’s impressed with the scale of talent coming through in Ireland.
“I didn't have scenes with any of them. But I’m a big admirer of both of them and Jessie I finally met when we were doing press and she is everything I hoped. I think she’s a wonderful, wonderful actress with a richness and truth in everything she does. She’s remarkable. It was lovely meeting her because she’s just the wonderful Irish girl I hoped she would be.”
He is familiar with the Irish, having worked and travelled here many times over the years, and even met his second wife, Megan, in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel. “She lived and worked there for five years. We met in The Horseshoe Bar. I was working at the same time on King Arthur.”
He knows the business better than most, witnessed huge changes in recent years and knows what a tough industry it has become to survive in.
Nevertheless, four of his six children have followed him into acting and two of them have enjoyed international success. Bill has played Pennywise the evil clown in the last two It movies, while Alexander has starred in such small-screen hits as True Blood and Big Little Lies.
“We all live within five minutes walking distance here in Stockholm, so I see them a lot. I'm happy for them. But I’ve been in this business so long. I know how superficial the success is, and how little it means in the long run.
“You’re up one day, and suddenly you’re fantastic. And the next day, people barely talk to you. It’s the media side of it, it’s all bullshit. And they know that and I’m happy they know that. I’m very happy that they're doing well. But most of all, I’m happy that they are happy and that they have good lives, and that they’re good people. I get really proud when I meet some actor, director or costume assistant and they say they’ve worked with one of my kids and they say it was wonderful. Then I’m really proud.”
