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It's a funny thing, being the child of a respected, accomplished, and famous actor. The very fact of your lineage comes with the hovering expectation that you'll follow in your father's footsteps and become an actor, and if you do, that you'll take similar roles, with a similar style. Michael Gandolfini will play wiseguys; Cooper Hoffman will carve out a niche for himself as a character actor; Scott Eastwood will talk tough through his gritted teeth. They're their dads' sons, after all.
Bill Skarsgård may not mean to diverge from the filmography of his father, the Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård, but boy, Bill's doing the most to be his own man. To say that his looks help in his favor would be true — Bill takes after his mother (My Skarsgård, also Swedish, also an actor) more than his father — but unconstructive. If you know one of his performances above the rest, it's likely Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the prancing bogeyman tormenting the town of Derry, Maine, in the 2017 and 2019 adaptations of Stephen King's monumental novel, It — where makeup and prosthetics made the man nearly indistinguishable from the monster.
While he's part of a tremendously prolific and talented acting family, Bill's carved a niche for himself that sets him up as one of the 21st century's most dynamic actors, someone so electrifying that you can't take your eyes off him for a second. Now's the time to leap into all things Bill Skarsgård!
Who is Bill Skarsgård?
Born in 1990 in Stockholm, Sweden, Bill Skarsgård is the fourth of Stellan Skarsgård's eight children: the six he had with his ex-wife, My Skarsgård, and the two he had with his current wife, Megan Everett. Of that tally, seven happen to be boys. Seven of his kids also happen to work in the movie and television businesses, including Bill, of course, and the eldest Skarsgård sibling, Alexander. That's a whole lot of cinematic Skarsgårding.
When did Bill Skarsgård start acting?
Strictly speaking, 2000, in the Swedish thriller White Water, where four guys take a kayaking holiday that goes terribly awry. He showed up in 2 episodes of the Swedish miniseries Pappa polis in 2002, as well, but appears to have taken a hiatus of a sort afterward; remember, he was still young at the time, and beside that, had doubts about whether he actually wanted to be an actor.
It took a part co-starring in Arn: The Kingdom at Road's End in 2008, alongside his father and his brother Gustaf, for Skarsgård to settle on his career path and continue honing his craft. (He plays Gustaf's son in that film, a small but nonetheless thoroughly amusing detail.) From there, the roles picked up: He played the co-lead, Pontus, in the 2009 sci-fi comedy Kenny Begins, received a Guldbagge Award nomination for his starring role in 2010's Simple Simon (while also starring in the drama film Behind Blue Skies in the same year), and kept rolling along from there.
How quickly did he find his breakout role?
2012 and 2013 arguably mark the next significant early milestones in Skarsgård's career. In the former, he cameoed in Anna Karenina, which adapted the seminal Leo Tolstoy novel with a script from master playwright Tom Stoppard and direction by Joe Wright. His part in the film is small, but even a small part in a production that is primed for awards season attention is one worth embracing. To that end, he played one of the co-leads in Eli Roth's Netflix series Hemlock Grove, making his horror debut as Roman, the brooding Godfrey family heir.
It would be stretching the truth to say that Skarsgård is a "horror guy," given that he's worked on scant few horror films and shows. But if horror isn't his sole milieu, or even his most common one, the benefit that horror has had on his career trajectory is unmistakable. Hemlock Grove earned only a modest reception among critics and viewers. But it identified Skarsgård as an actor willing to step outside his comfort zone. After squeezing two more cameos under his belt — in 2016's The Divergent Series: Allegiant, the last gasp of the YA series adaptation that couldn't, and 2017's Atomic Blonde, the "John Wick, but a woman in the Cold War" Charlize Theron vehicle — he'd take the furthest step beyond those bounds yet.
…go on.
His breakout role! It! He starred in Andy Muschietti's It! Remember? Back in 2017? We went over this already.
That was, like, seven paragraphs ago! And you didn't even mention Andy Muschietti then, either!
Fine. So, again: It.
Playing Pennywise, an all-timer in King's rogue's gallery of gruesome, slavering monsters, would have been a big deal for Skarsgård at a neutral time in horror's life cycle. But around 2017, horror was making waves. Starting earlier in the decade, the genre's stock slowly rose among critics and viewers who previously dismissed horror out of hand as disposable. Jennifer Kent's The Babadook is the clearest source of origin for horror's present day golden age, though I think it's worth giving Ben Wheatley's Kill List a nod too, as a standout early 2010s entry in the gen-
Focus.
The point is, horror writ large started attracting more mainstream crowds in 2017 than it had years prior. Remember, Get Out opened to rapturous notices and an absurd box office take in February of that year. Folks started taking horror more seriously and treating it not as a guilty pleasure but as valid entertainment and, dare I say, art. When It opened that September, the film coalesced into something resembling an event — with Skarsgård at its center, dominating the screen in a role long associated with Tim Curry, who played Pennywise in ABC's made-for-TV miniseries adaptation in 1990.
Skarsgård's performance did more than just stand out from Curry's, though. Skarsgård became Pennywise, in spirit as much as in appearance. Nowadays, with both chapters of Muschietti's It in the books, it's quite possible that Skarsgård gets to claim that primary association with the Derry clown, and not Curry. That's a feat to brag about.
Did he work on any Stephen King projects aside from It?
Great question — yes! As if to tide It's audience over in the lead-up to It Chapter 2, Hulu's Castle Rock premiered in 2018.
If I'm being honest, it's not particularly good; the show premises a skein of interconnected themes, storylines, and concepts derived from King's bibliography, all unified through the "multiverse" trope — which has by now grown wildly overused. Alternate timelines and overlapping characters abound. The cast is absolutely stacked (à la Melanie Lynskey, André Holland, Jane Levy, Sissy Spacek), and creators Dustin Thomason and Sam Shaw never want for atmosphere. Castle Rock is habitually spooky. But it's also aimless.
Let's leave King behind, then. After It, What came next for Skarsgård?
Plenty good, though nothing quite on It's level for the first few years. Between those films, he appeared as an incensed and vengeful high school student in Assassination Nation, played Maika Monroe's boyfriend in the "botched home invasion" horror comedy Villains, and parachuted into a wood chipper in Deadpool 2.
After It Chapter Two, he voiced the alien Kro in Chloe Zhao's Eternals, in what is cited as one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's most wasted casting choices to this day; played an unborn soul in Edson Oda's high concept metaphysical drama Nine Days; and breathed evangelical neurosis into post-World War II PTSD in The Devil All the Time.
And he's great in each of them! (Well, most of them. There's a reason his work in Eternals is called a waste.) Skarsgård's talent runs deep, but one gift of his that deserves recognition is his economy. There are no small parts for him. Whether his screen time is slim or substantial, he knows how to wring the greatest effect out of the material given him. For instance, he's memorably douchey as Mark, the spurned boyfriend of Odessa Young's lead in Assassination Nation, despite his limited presence in the movie; his pessimism and recalcitrance in Nine Days belie the grip his fear of failure has over him.
It's easy to make a meal of a character given pages of dialogue and direction. Doing more with less invites actors' utmost thoughtfulness over their choices. Skarsgård meets that challenge by communicating character details through expression when he has just a few minutes with the camera. He's a thinking man's actor. If his name is by now as synonymous with Pennywise as with his father, at least he's a strong enough performer to secure roles that exist outside that reputation — though reputation can be a blessing, too.
How do you figure?
Actors don't necessarily love being inextricably linked to one character in particular from their repertoire; that can cast a shadow over the rest of the work they do, as if the one character is all they'll ever be known for. But that dynamic has its advantages. In 2022, Zach Cregger hired Skarsgård to make a combined casting and marketing coup with his Detroit-set debut, Barbarian; it's the first of Skarsgård's post-It projects to capitalize on his Pennywise image.
His very presence in the film is immediately suggestive. At the start of what looks like Airbnb horror, his character, Keith, lounges in the rental booked for Georgina Campbell's character, Tess, who's in town for a job interview. Cregger molds their exchanges around suspicion. Tess is wary of Keith. He's not supposed to be there, and she thinks it a tad dubious that the rental's owner double-booked the place. And we don't blame her for her vigilance, either! It's Skarsgård, the once and future Pennywise! How can you trust a man like that?
If you've seen the movie, the answer is given with blunt-force violence. The good news is that Keith is just a regular, well-meaning guy. The bad news is that there is an irregular, not-well-meaning thing lurking in the house. In Tess' shoes, you might almost prefer facing Pennywise. At least he can only hurt you as much as he can scare you.
Why hasn't Skarsgård played more monsters since playing Pennywise? Isn't that his milieu?
A point of order: Because nothing in 2024 can be successful without being subjected to franchising, Skarsgård will don the red wig and slather on grease paint to play Pennywise once again in It: Welcome to Derry, an It prequel series coming 2025 on HBO. If you must, you may groan.
In the short term, Skarsgård is in theaters now as the decrepit, nauseating, and utterly terrifying Count Orlok in Robert Eggers' upcoming rendition of Nosferatu. (Mild spoilers: He's superb in it.) If you want to see him step back into the "monster" role, you must have had a happy Christmas. (Counterprogramming at its finest. Merry, merry!)
But 2024 was determined to remind audiences of Skarsgård's dexterity as an actor. Lionsgate released Moritz Mohr's hyperkinetic action-revenge movie Boy Kills World in late April, months after its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023; in August, the company put to bed literal decades of hand-wringing over a reboot of The Crow, opening Rupert Sanders' baffling treatment of the material in theaters to the tune of a catastrophic box office take. We did not need that movie. Boy Kills World, even accounting for the ways the script lets down the basic conceit, feels more essential.
And then there's Count Orlok in Nosferatu, the only role that could overshadow Timothée Chalamet's turn as Bob Dylan in the much-hyped A Complete Unknown. (Don't believe me? Just watch!)
What do these roles have to do with each other, exactly?
Think about the leap from Skarsgård's past filmography, all the way up to 2023, then until now. Previously, he'd starred in approximately zero movies that ask him to take his shirt off, to get his abs ripped so he has a reason to go shirtless, and to beat up stuntmen. (Maybe he trained for Arn: The Kingdom at Road's End.)
Now, he's done all of that: as the anonymous "Boy" in Boy Kills World (where the "kid" he plays revolts against the one-percenter family who rule the city he calls home with an iron fist) and as Eric Draven, The Crow's haunted, tormented antihero (revived from death to exact vengeance on his and his girlfriend Shelley's (FKA Twigs) murderers). Even Orlok is kind of a hunk. A hunk of rotting flesh.
I guess you could lump these characters all together under the same dilapidated umbrella as men on missions; Eric and Boy want revenge, and Count Orlok wants Lily-Rose Depp's virtue. (Also, her blood.) But they share little if anything else in common either with one another, or with Skarsgård's prior roles. Yes, he played the villain in John Wick: Chapter 4 just last year, and you might think of him as a metaphorical vampiric figure, sucking the life out of the film's criminal underworld if its elements displease him. But the collection of movies Skarsgård's in this year nonetheless feels unprecedented — and different.
Happily, that's in keeping with Skarsgård's entire professional arc. No blueprint exists for playing Pennywise in his pre-2017 roles; Skarsgård nailed the character all the same. In a way that takes a layer of shine off of his performance as Orlok — by now we know he's a tremendous performer of monstrous beings, and so it falls within his established wheelhouse — but the progression from clown to Count is meaningful. Maybe he's just finding his groove, learning what gratifies him in the roles he takes, and honing his style.
Last question: how long are Bill Skarsgård's fingers?
… That's a very specific curiosity you've got there! You'll have to watch Nosferatu to find out.
