He’s Built Like an Aryan Superman. He’s Starred in Blockbuster Movies. And Yet He’s Still Somehow Underrated.

Wicker is this year’s most unexpected delight. A remarkably assured second feature from husband-and-wife writer-director team Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, Wicker tells the story of a lonely, misanthropic fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who asks a master wicker craftsman (Peter Dinklage) to make her a husband. He complies, and imbues the resulting wicker golem (Alexander Skarsgård) with a soul. This odd marriage awakens the fisherwoman’s heart and loins, and, in its inversion of traditional medieval gender roles, causes chaos in her village. Wicker is presented as a fable. Every character is named after their job, and though it has way more sexcapades than your typical Brothers Grimm story, its ending still feels ripped straight from their pages. The film’s marriage of the libidinal to the folkloric not only leads to some great gags, but deepens its inquiry into the nature of marital happiness.

The movie is so chockablock with winning performances, it might be easy to overlook exactly how good Alexander Skarsgård is as the Wicker Husband. The role is deceptively simple—the film’s running joke is that Husband is guileless and doesn’t understand subtext—but with an abundance of grace notes, Skarsgård does a lot with it. The Wicker Husband begins walking with a stiff gait, his every movement accompanied by the sounds of straining wood fiber. He speaks haltingly, in declarative subject-predicate-object sentences, and has no hidden agendas. But as the film progresses, Skarsgård’s movements become more flowing while never seeming quite human. His eyes, originally so stoic, begin to convey the things he doesn’t know how to say. By the time he and Fisherwoman pull off a very modern slow dance at a wedding and he turns to her and says, “You are the reason I live and breathe,” it’s unclear whether he is declaring love or simply stating the facts of how he came into existence.

That we might consider a golem’s capacity for love at all is a testament to Skarsgård’s sweetness and finesse. The smartest decision that Fischer and Wilson make is not to use motion capture, instead putting Skarsgård in an actual wicker costume with extensive prosthetics. This allows him to radiate his natural humanity, even if it made such mundane tasks as eating lunch on set torturous. Skarsgård’s performance is the quietest in the film, but in its subtlety and warmth it is wonderfully moving. We probably shouldn’t expect any less from him by now. Over a two-decade career in everything from campy vampire TV shows to small indie films, Skarsgård has turned in dozens of performances that are as carefully honed as they are unshowy. If he’s rarely on people’s lists of important actors, it may be because of his refusal to show off, his preference for the microdetail over the broad gesture.

I can’t stop thinking about Alexander Skarsgård’s IMDb page. It’s not the list of credits, nor is it the reminder of his few futile attempts at blockbuster stardom. Instead, it’s the pair of photos at the top of the page, one of which features him in a charcoal blazer and black heavyweight cotton T-shirt, his pellucid eyes aglow, an insincere red-carpet smile crinkling his eyes. The other, taken at the MTV Movie Awards a decade ago, presents us a different Skarsgård. From the waist up, he’s wearing a tuxedo, but he’s not wearing any pants. The hint of a smile is there around the edges, but in this photo he’s trying to keep a straight face, the seriousness of his pose making the image all the more ridiculous. There’s something essential about Skarsgård captured here, the tension between solemnity and mischief, the inherent poker face of Scandinavians, the versatility of his eyes. And, of course, his impossible good looks.

Liking Alexander Skarsgård should be a challenge. He’s built like an Aryan Superman, and he’s a nepo baby. Yet he is so alluring, so transfixing to watch, and ultimately so talented that one cannot help but be won over by him. His résumé is filled with bold moves, oddball choices, and roughly one quintillion sex scenes. It is refreshingly devoid of the typical star’s need to be liked, or to parlay a consistent type across projects. And, while his physique keeps him from ever being quite able to disappear into a role, nearly every character he brings to life feels distinct, and possessed of a unique inner life that he is conjuring up before the audience.

If you want to see very quickly what makes Skarsgård so compelling on screen, watch his eyes. Not only does he have that quality some actors possess where he appears able to turn a light on behind them so that they glow, but you can see within them the character’s entire inner journey.

This is what animates his performance in Pillion, yet another winning British film, also from this year, in which Skarsgård’s mysterious biker Ray takes awkward introvert Colin (Harry Melling) under his wing—or perhaps his boot—and becomes his master in an S&M romance. For all its provocative sex games, Pillion is a movie that leans heavily on what goes unsaid. Neither Colin nor Ray is given much specificity in the script, and both men are unable to openly express themselves, Colin because of his shyness, Ray because of his brute taciturnity. The film runs the risk of being either unwatchably bleak or a cartoon, but Melling and Skarsgård find the care and affection within the relationship that makes it bearable, and transform what could be straightforward abuse into complex kink. Skarsgård’s eyes are forever revealing to us that Ray’s withholding comes from his own inadequacies. He is afraid of intimacy, and almost unable to function when presented with real feelings. In one sequence, Colin intentionally burns his hands in order to achieve an emotional catharsis while grieving his mother. Skarsgård wordlessly communicates Ray’s confusion when he sees Colin screaming in rage and pain, the way that actually comforting another human being is, for Ray, a difficult and treacherous endeavor. It’s a perfect setup for the eventual end of the two men’s relationship, which happens wordlessly, as Skarsgård somehow turns the inner glow of his eyes off.

I asked Marielle Heller, who directed Skarsgård in her startling debut The Diary of a Teenage Girl, about that inner glow, and she said she found it as confusing as I did. “It’s the magic of actors,” Heller said. “You see it and you go, ‘Oh, that’s a movie-star thing that I can’t comprehend.’ ” The Diary of a Teenage Girl is one of many films in Skarsgård’s filmography that push back against the conventional rules of movie stardom, films in which he plays despicable people, and somehow makes them more dangerous by rendering them at human scale. In Diary’s case, that character is Monroe, who begins a sexual affair with the titular teenage girl, Minnie (Bel Powley), who is not only 15 but the daughter of his girlfriend Charlotte (Kristen Wiig). The film lives on a tonal knife edge. Narrated by Minnie, who initially views the “relationship” as both a transcendent love story and a sexual awakening, Diary treats the affair with great complexity, trusting the viewers to see the ways that Minnie is being manipulated and exploited by Monroe. Skarsgård similarly never judges Monroe, and keeps us guessing about his motives. Is he a pedophile? An amoral dunderhead? A manchild caught up in 1970s San Francisco’s promise of sexual freedom? Does any of this actually matter, given the impact his actions have on others?

“Alex is one of the people who I refer to when I talk about what I want out of an actor,” Heller said. “He’s on one hand so committed, does all the preparation, but he’s also so open to being directed. He is spectacularly nuanced and complex with his portrayal of characters, and unafraid of playing people who are dark or complicated.” He lacks, Heller said, the normal movie-star hang-ups about branding and ingratiating themselves to audiences. “He really cares about character. He came into the film with a curiosity about how someone could have the proclivities Monroe had. My main memory is just how fearless and curious he seemed.”

Diary was both Heller and Powley’s first film, and Heller says that on set, Skarsgård took on the role of the “head of the acting department,” which she didn’t realize she even needed. “He sets the tone for everybody on how to act professionally on set. He’s a great scene partner. I have memories of him adjusting his body so Bel could be seen in the proper light, but somehow he did it without ever seeming like he was doing it, or breaking character.” The three did extensive rehearsals prior to shooting, and broke the script down like a play, going beat by beat, and developing the characters’ backstory, so that they could pull off such an emotionally knotty film in 24 days of shooting.

It’s not that Skarsgård can’t be likeable—he’s endlessly charming in Murderbot or Wicker or his various TV guest appearances or the Zoolander movies, in which he dies in a freak gasoline-fight accident—but rather that he often does his most exciting work going to places other frighteningly beautiful leading men tend to avoid. Could you imagine, for example, any of the Chrises or the Canadian Ryans signing on to play Nicole Kidman’s abusive husband in Big Little Lies? Would any of them make Infinity Pool, one of Skarsgård’s best films, in which he plays a failed author who falls in with a group of wealthy tourists in a fictional country who commit capital crimes so they can watch their doppelgangers be murdered in their stead? Even if you could, it’s hard to imagine any of them doing what Skarsgård does with the role of James Foster. Infinity Pool is a movie in which a man loses his soul, and then futilely attempts to get it back. It’s another performance in which the part lives in the silences and the little facial expressions. There’s a half-smile Skarsgård pulls that is as terrifying as anything I’ve seen this year, yet when the film necessitates going to nearly Nic Cage–level extremes, he is equally game.

Let’s hope that Skarsgård continues in this vein, choosing risky roles, wearing bizarre red-carpet outfits, and taking the work—but not himself—seriously, because there is something about his freaky charisma that malfunctions when stuffed into the dull military uniforms and loincloths of conventional Hollywood leading roles. It may be his disinterest in bombast and the conventional rules of stardom, but if it’s hard to imagine the Chrises and Ryans of the world in Infinity Pool, any one of them would probably have seemed less lost in The Legend of Tarzan or Battleship.

Those movies were never going to be on anyone’s highlight reels, of course, but Skarsgård’s weakest performance in a real movie can be found in Robert Eggers’ art house epic The Northman. The film—a retelling of the legend of Amleth, which is the basis for Shakespeare’s Hamlet—was a passion project of Skarsgård’s, one of only a handful of movies he’s produced. But despite doing enormous amounts of research for the role and adopting a grueling training regimen to look the part, the actor is swallowed whole by Eggers’ overwrought production and the script’s nearly total elimination of its hero’s personality. Eggers’ screenplay cuts the most fascinating part of Amleth’s story—his feigned madness—and Skarsgård is mostly reduced to walking through carefully choreographed master shots and grunting. The fun in the film is instead had by the supporting cast, who get to hallucinate (Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe), villainously chew scenery (Claes Bang), or slyly plot their liberation (Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman). The Northman somehow makes having a naked sword duel on a volcano boring. The only thing that could save it is a sense of camp, which Skarsgård, unlike his brother Bill in Eggers’ Nosferatu, mostly lacks.

Luckily, it doesn’t seem like Skarsgård is drawn to those kinds of hyper-butch projects very often. He far more frequently turns over masculinity’s rocks to see the worms wriggling underneath. Skarsgård’s next release, beyond a new season of Murderbot, is set to be The Wolf Will Tear Your Immaculate Hands, from the Costa Rican Swedish writer-director Nathalie Álvarez Mesén, who made waves in 2021 with Clara Sola, which won the Swedish equivalent of the Best Picture Oscar. Skarsgård is thus again taking a chance on a director who is as interesting as she is relatively unknown. It’s the kind of risk he’s taken and pulled off so frequently now that he’s made his career—and his work—look easy. But few actors of his stature invite us so frequently to gaze into the complexity of the flesh-and-blood—or sometimes wicker—people they play. When you stare into that particular abyss, of course, Skarsgård stares back, eyes aglow, daring you to go deeper into the mystery of the human. Whether or not he’s wearing any pants.