Alexander Skarsgård looks back on Zoolander , his first U.S. role: 'very crazy and very glamorous'

Alexander Skarsgård has vivid memories of shooting his first U.S. film, Zoolander. "The fact that we shot it driving this Jeep down Broadway [in Manhattan], cutting through traffic, singing the Wham! song.... it was all very surreal," Skarsgård says when he sat down with EW in April to discuss his career highlights to date. "I was barely an actor — I was on vacation in Hollywood when I got the job."

Skarsgård, only 25 at the time, had been doing a play in Stockholm when he accompanied his father, Chernobyl actor Stellan, on a business trip to L.A. By happenstance, he auditioned for the role of the orange-mocha-Frappuccino-loving model Meekus and got the part. "It was my first audition," Skarsgård says. "So I couldn't quite believe that two weeks later I was in New York shooting that scene with Ben Stiller. And obviously, the infamous gasoline fight was a lot of fun."

That hilariously tragic scene between Stiller's Derek Zoolander, Meekus and two other male model friends required some high energy — and some very bright liquids. "We're all Method actors," Skarsgård deadpans, "so we used real gasoline, obviously."

Paramount Pictures

Skarsgård now stars as the Viking prince Amleth in The Northman, a gruesome tale of loss and revenge set in 10th-century Iceland. He's reunited with his previous screen partner Nicole Kidman, who played his wife in HBO's Big Little Lies, and, who in The Northman, plays his mother. "It's a very different dynamic playing a mother-son as opposed to husband-wife, but I was just over the moon," the actor says. "I was just thrilled to be reunited. Working with Nicole on Big Little Lies was one of the absolute highlights of my career."

Bonds of camaraderie built on the set of Big Little Lies helped when it came to portraying their "dark, twisted, weird, dysfunctional relationship" in The Northman. "To explore that with someone not only of that caliber but who's also a friend meant a lot, because it's someone I really trusted deeply and felt comfortable being completely open and vulnerable with," Skarsgård says.

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