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Stellan Skarsgrd may play Boris Shcherbina, the toe-the-party-line government figure turned whistleblower in HBO's Chernobyl , but appearing in the much-heralded docudrama is far from his first experience with Ukraine's man-made nuclear disaster. He lived it, as residual clouds overtook the skies of Northern Sweden homeland.
"We couldn't eat berries, or mushrooms, or reindeer meat for years," he said in an interview with Men's Health. "So, it was quite a dramatic thing in Sweden at that time."
Living not in the Soviet system, but rather in "happy Sweden," as Skarsgrd referred to it, he was aware that there was a nuclear incident with disastrous outcomes. But living in Sweden-the Western world-he was totally removed from from the dark reality of the situation. He still didn't know the why of the incident, until researching for Chernobyl on HBO, eventually learning that the on-screen depiction was incredibly accurate.
He didn't realize, for one, that the disaster wasn't inevitable; that, in fact, it was an avoidable incident that was made worse and worse through a stubborn government's refusal to admit fault. "I did not know about how the Soviet system in itself was one of the causes of this accident," he said. "When you have a system that has to be infallible, that cannot allow that there are any flaws in the system, people start lying and hiding truths."
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He found what he could find, and looked at photos of Shcherbina, but it was more important for Skarsgrd to fit the necessities of the script , and his own imagination's version of who that character should consistently be. It was also important for him to make sure that he worked well with Harris.
"We have an interesting arch to play there from this total antagonism, to a very close friendship," he said.
A big part of the relationship that Skarsgrd describes comes from the two lead characters throwing around a lot of nuclear power jargon. It's important for the two performers to get these pieces technically correct, but to also make sure that the point is still conveyed to the viewers who may not be as scientifically savvy as their characters are.
Did he understand any of what he was saying? Skarsgrd said it wasn't too hard to wrap his head around the physics concepts. But he immediately recalled his role in the '90s classic Good Will Hunting, which saw him play an advanced mathematician. "I did not understand anything of what I said there," he said.
For the entirety of his career-which has now lasted more than 50 years-he's been a chameleon, blending in from film to film, whether it's that advanced mathematician in Good Will Hunting, a decomposing pirate in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, a scientist in the Thor and Avengers films, or even the goofy travel writer in both Mamma Mia! films. He's become a master of not only capturing different characters, but capturing different moods.
"The different moods ... that's my job. That's what I enjoy about it," Skarsgrd said. "I enjoyed going from Mamma Mia! to [Chernobyl], and being all over the place, and not fulfilling any expectation from the audience. To me, It's like having a very varied diet."
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Skarsgrd might be further varying that diet for his role in director Denis Villeneuve's remake of Dune, which will find him playing the film's rotund villain ("He's really bad. He's also really fat."). The movie is set to film in Budapest this summer and hit theaters in the fall of 2020. The movie's extensive and rather impressive cast has been well documented, including Timothe Chalamet, Josh Brolin, Oscar Isaac, Jason Momoa, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, and more.
Given what the character of Harkonnen looked like in book images through the years (Dune is based on Frank Herbert's fantasy novel), and in David Lynch's original adaptation , we can expect Skarsgrd's take to also be fairly gruesome, and when he mentions how much time he'll need to get into character each day on set. "I will have to spend six to eight hours in makeup every day," he said, pointing out that, in this case, thankfully it's a confined role. "So, I'm glad he's not on every page."
