5 Stellan Skarsgård Roles Every Filmmaker Should Study

Stellan Skarsgård just won a Golden Globe for Sentimental Value, one of the best films of 2025. It's long overdue recognition for one of the industry's most versatile workhorses, who has chosen challenging roles across international TV and film for decades now.

We hope the win inspires others to check on Joachim Trier's film, but if you've seen it already and need some more Skarsgård viewing, check out these important works from the Swedish actor, too.

Sentimental Value

In Trier's family drama, Skarsgård plays Gustav Borg, an aging auteur filmmaker trying to reconnect with his estranged daughters.

When W Magazine asked him about playing a director, Skarsgård said his first goal was payback.

"My instinct, immediately, when I knew I was going to play a director, was revenge," he said. "There was so much I could do to make fun of directors!"

But the role required more complexity than that. As Skarsgård told the magazine, Gustav needed to be "more sensitive in his directing than in his personal life." He's a man who can draw nuanced performances on set but stumbles in every personal relationship.

In conversation with NPR, Skarsgård described Gustav as someone who "wants to reach [his children], and he wants to have contact with them again, but he does not know how to do it."

There's tragedy in a character like this. If you're a writer, let your characters be complicated—they don't have to be all one thing, or the same in every setting.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

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Speaking of characters who aren't all one thing! Skarsgård plays the villain in this one, but unfamiliar viewers won't know it until the very end.

David Fincher's 2011 thriller cast Skarsgård as Martin Vanger, the charming CEO hiding a monstrous appetite. According to Blackfilm, Skarsgård was drawn to the character's split personality and was fascinated by the prospect of portraying him.

"There's so much contradiction in it," he told Blackfilm. "And you get to play him in two totally different ways, which I thought was fascinating. And then you had the problems of having a five-minute monologue in the basement that you have to calibrate, so that you reveal he is a monster, but at the same time, you've got to make him recognizable as a human being, and you want the audience even to see a little of themselves in it."

You don't want to write a villain as a cartoon (usually). They need to feel like a person who would exist, and perhaps even be relatable.

He told Digital Spy that a couple of things are sure-fire ways to get him to sign on to a film.

"Very often it's the director that I'm attracted to. If it's a really good director, I don't even have to read the script to say yes. When Lars Von Trier calls me, I say yes without reading the script because often the script hasn't been written yet, and if Fincher called me again, I'd say yes without reading the script too. But sometimes it is the script that appeals to me, sometimes it's the story, sometimes it's the cast—it varies. Sometimes it's just that I want to do something different to what I just did."

Andor

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I've been outspoken in my love for Andor, and I think Skarsgård's Luthen Rael is part of the reason why. The Star Wars series challenged him to portray moral complexity in a franchise usually built on clear heroes and villains.

In an interview with StarWars.com, Skarsgård explained he was never surprised by Luthen's ruthless choices.

"I have to play the character as [someone who] believes in the revolution," he said. He added, “Even if you play a hard guy like Luthen, he doesn’t have to be hard all the time. And if he doesn’t have empathy, then he has got nothing to do in the revolution, because the reason for revolution is empathy.”

Speaking with CBC's Q, Skarsgård talked about the importance of subtext.

"If they cut away when you don't talk, you're f*cked," he said. "Half of the acting is between the lines—reacting. And the lines might just be dropped like a turd, poof! Like that. And then comes the reaction that says what the line was intended as."

Directors, editors... let those lines breathe! Give the character a second or two to emote. Don't rush away from the beat.

It's worth noting that Skarsgård filmed Andor's second season after suffering a stroke in 2022. Newsweek reported (and he has talked about it himself) that he sometimes uses an earpiece with an assistant feeding him lines.

The fact that his performance remains compelling despite this challenge speaks to his understanding of emotional truth.

In Order of Disappearance

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Hans Petter Moland's dark revenge comedy In Order of Disappearance (Kraftidioten) gave Skarsgård one of his most physically demanding roles as Nils, a snowplow driver who becomes an unlikely vigilante.

The movie is surprisingly funny and violent. As Skarsgård told The Scotsman, "What interested me was how funny can you be without losing substance. My character is interesting because, yeah, he’s a vigilante, but he happens to be a vigilante in a farce. At the same time, he’s the realistic center of it and has to be there to ground all the more over-the-top characters."

Skarsgård learned to actually drive the 40-ton snowplow for the role. And according to The Arts Desk, he "had a lot of fun doing it" despite shooting in temperatures down to -28°C.

Nils spends a lot of the film working alone, so Skarsgård isn't playing off of anyone or speaking his feelings, a unique challenge for an actor.

In The Knockturnal, Skarsgård explained, "Most of the time, I'm saying one-liners and punching people in the face. To me, it's such a pleasure to work without dialogue because film is not like theater; it's not a literary art form. So, for me, it's a pleasure to work with a director that is an expert in telling a story without having the actors have to tell it."

For filmmakers, this is a great learning opportunity. You don't always need spoken dialogue. Let action speak for itself.

Chernobyl

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Skarsgård played Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Boris Shcherbina in HBO's Chernobyl miniseries. It's a masterpiece written by Craig Mazin.

Skarsgård lived in Sweden when the disaster happened. As he told Men's Health, "We couldn't eat berries, or mushrooms, or reindeer meat for years. So, it was quite a dramatic thing in Sweden at that time."

The show features one of the best examples of the enemies-to-friends trope in the central relationship between Shcherbina and scientist Valery Legasov (Jared Harris), who start as opposites but must work together to prevent further disaster.

Speaking with Collider, he said, "I wouldn’t call them love story, but it was very close to a love story that starts very badly, and ends very well. But it’s two very different characters, so finding the common ground of the gradual growing of friendship between them was a wonderful arc to investigate."

That arc forms the emotional core of the series. According to Deadline, much of that relationship came about as they were making the show.

"It was something that developed on set, where Johan Renck and Craig were sure to capture what was happening between the lines, in the way we look at each other, the way we move together," Skarsgård said.

It seems a big focus for Skarsgård is about what happens between words. That's where he always seems to find the truth of his characters.

Let us know your favorite Skarsgård roles.