Midsommar actor had to walk through woods as part of unusual audition process

It’s no spoiler to say that the horror film Midsommar, Ari Aster’s follow-up to Hereditary, is a deeply strange film. And for actor Vilhelm Blomgren, the weirdness began with his audition.

“I was actually just finishing up a Swedish HBO series [Gösta], and the same casting agent was a part of Midsommar, so she called me,” Blomgren tells EW. “She was very specific about the self-tape, like, ‘Can you start by walking thirty meters’ — or something — ‘in the woods, and then you do the scene.’ I was like, ‘Okay. Yeah, sure.’ But that eventually got me the part. Maybe.”

Midsommar (out July 3) stars Florence Pugh and Jack Reynor as an American couple, Dani and Christian, who embark on a trip to Scandinavia with friends Mark (Will Poulter), Josh (William Jackson Harper), and Pelle (Blomgren), the latter of whom has invited them to visit his remote village in Sweden. “They’re a really weird, culty kind of commune,” Reynor told EW earlier this year. “Everybody’s all dressed in white, they have strange kinds of social cliques.”

Aster cast many Swedes in the film, which was shot in Hungary.

“He kind of left the Swedes to do their own thing a bit,” says Blomgren. “We actually did a lot of meditation. Because [in the film] we communicate so much with just looking at each other, we had workshops doing that for hours, just dancing and doing things together.”

Blomgren is keen to point out that the many horrors that occur in the movie are not reflective of actual Swedish society.

“It was pretty humorous to read the script, actually,” he says, “because it’s actually nothing at all [like that], just so you know.”

Related content:

• Hereditary director teases ‘horrors’ of new film Midsommar
• Jordan Peele talks Midsommar with director Ari Aster in new Fangoria