Post your questions for Stellan Skarsgård

No one could accuse Stellan Skarsgård of sloth. The father of eight (including Alexander, Bill and five other boys and one girl) has one of the most wide-ranging and well-populated filmographies of an actor still working.

Yet until he was 45, his was a largely unfamiliar name to those outside the cinema of his native Sweden. That changed in 1996 when he starred alongside Emily Watson in Breaking the Waves: the film which marked a breakthrough for both actors, as well as its director, Lars von Trier.

Skarsgård has since collaborated with Von Trier on Dancer in the Dark, Dogville, Melancholia and Nymphomaniac, but quickly spread his wings across a broad range of genres in US cinema, too: before the end of the century he’d also featured in Amistad, Good Will Hunting, Ronin, Deep Blue Sea, Timecode and Kiss Kiss (Bang Bang).

He channelled Max von Sydow for a couple of Exorcist films in the early 2000s, then got rolled in cockles for a couple of Pirates of the Caribbean adventures. He was one of Meryl Steep’s old flames in 2008’s Mamma Mia! (and the 2018 followup) and then began his stint as a sometime-nude astrophysicist in assorted Avengers movies, beginning with Kenneth Branagh’s Thor and ending with Joss Whedon’s Age of Ultron.

Other films included The Railway Man, opposite Colin Firth, David Fincher’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Branagh’s Cinderella and John le Carré adaptation Our Kind of Traitor. More recently he’s been seen in Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, horrific war movie The Painted Bird, the TV show Chernobyl and Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.

Next up is Hope, the Norwegian entry for the Oscars earlier this year, in which he plays a man whose wife is diagnosed with a brain tumour.

As well as being an enormously respected actor, Skarsgård has earned a considerable reputation for fun-loving, irreverence and loyalty. Although he played a heap of snow in a school play, he grew up wanting to be a diplomat, before early encounters with the opposite sex made acting seem a more attractive option.

His friend, Paul Bettany, who named his son after him, has called Skarsgård “the all-time heavyweight vodka-drinking champion of the world”; sample quote from the man himself includes “I have a very relaxed relationship with my genitals.”

Last month he went viral for a forensic explanation of why market forces – rather than Marvel or Netflix – are destroying cinema.

Post your questions for Skarsgård below; comments will close at midday on Wednesday and his responses will be published in Film&Music on 26 November (and online the previous day). Hope is released in the UK on 10 December.