September 13, 2002

Stellan Skarsgård, who plays a duplicitous con man in Matt Dillon's City Of Ghosts, has had it rough in films.

His legs were chopped off on an oil rig in Breaking The Waves, while his arm was chomped off by a shark in Deep Blue Sea.

"It's not that I want it," Skarsgård told a press conference yesterday. "But a lot of people obviously want to do nasty things to me. I don't know why."

City Of Ghosts co-writer Barry Gifford says they initially conceived of Skarsgård's role with Peter Lorre in mind.

"He wasn't available," deadpanned Skarsgård.

KEEP ROLLING: Skarsgård has got a full slate of movies coming up.

There's a Bob Rafaelson movie, The House On Turk Street, based on a short story by Dashiell Hammett, which he shot last year in Montreal with Samuel L. Jackson and Milla Jovovich, and the Lars von Trier film Dogville starring Nicole Kidman.

He starts shooting the prequel to The Exorcist with director Paul Schraeder in November.

"It's Max von Sydow's earlier story, the first time he encounters problems," says Skarsgård, who will start shooting in Morocco and Rome.

"I'm drawn to stuff that has some orginality to it. And there is a little more complexity than most average stuff, usually. I mean I come from the theatre so I'm used to Shakespeare and Chekhov, so not all movie scripts can compete with that."

Like the killer-sharks-with-big-brains movie, Deep Blue Sea, for example?

"For me as an actor it wasn't very immediate, but I had a great time doing it," he said. "And it's fun. That's boys playing. It's silly. But it's fun doing it. And I don't mind doing that. But only doing that would be scary. So then I can do a small film that nobody will see that is extremely complicated and dark." 

[Toronto Sun]