Skarsgård has always been pretty honest about his feelings on Ingmar Bergman. Speaking with The Guardian in 2012, he recalled, “Bergman was hyper-intelligent but I never liked him as a person. He was not a good man. All directors are control freaks but he was extreme. He did things to people that were not kosher. He didn’t destroy people to make them better actors: he destroyed them to utilise his power.”
On the flip side, Skarsgård has only good things to say about frequent collaborator Lars von Trier, who once infamously declared himself a Nazi at the Cannes Film Festival presser for Melancholia in 2011. “Everyone in that room knew he was not a Nazi, that he was the opposite, and yet they all used it as a headline. And then people who only read headlines thought he was a Nazi. He just told a bad joke. Lars grew up with a Jewish father and when his mother was dying, she told him he wasn’t his real father. It was her boss, who was a German,” Skarsgård defended his friend at Karlovy over a decade later. “When I meet people, especially in the U.S., they still [ask about it]. You have so many banned words over there. My kids can say any words they want—it depends on what their intention is.”
Skarsgård said von Trier is “not a misogynist” and that he loves the man and his work, though “that doesn’t mean I agree with everything he does. You don’t agree with everything your wife does, either,” the actor said. (Sure!) This also echoes remarks Skarsgård made in another 2012 Guardian interview, in which he said von Trier’s “way of talking is extremely brutal, but I talk the same to him. We don’t say sweet things to each other, we just offend each other, which is a sign of love. His irony, some parts of the world are not familiar with that.”
At the time, Skarsgård said von Trier is a wonderful man, as opposed to Bergman. “I don’t think Ingmar Bergman was a wonderful man. He was a great artist. But… I worked with him twice and I always kept him at a distance because I didn’t want him near my life. Lars I want in my life,” the Mamma Mia! star said. Asked why he didn’t want Bergman in his life, Skarsgård explained, “Because he is a control freak, he’ll even try to control people’s lives, he tried to control the entire film industry in Sweden, he fired and appointed bosses of theaters, television, he was involved in so much. And he crushed people, he destroyed people. He was not a very nice man. But a great director.”
Skarsgård admitted, “It was fun working with him in the moment, in the work moment. But other than that, I felt that the fear that was around him, even if he came smiling—he made everybody laugh just by smiling—it was this horrible feeling… It probably must have been the same around Goebbels, or something.”
