Horror is in good hands with Bill Skarsgård

For horror fans, Bill Skarsgård is It. Okay, apologies for the pun, but it’s hard to deny. To be sure, the genre is certainly not lacking for transcendent, bone-chilling performances right now: Toni Collette’s “I am your mother” monologue in Hereditary; Mia Goth’s wide-eyed ax-swinging in Pearl; newcomer Sophie Wilde’s teary possession in Talk To Me; and whatever the hell was going on with that terrifying Fisher-Price phone in Skinamarink all come to mind. But Bill Skarsgård—known for star-making turn after star-making turn in It and It Chapter Two, Hemlock Grove, Castle Rock, The Devil All The Time, Villains, and more—is on another level entirely.

To understand why, one needs only to look to Derry, Maine—or rather, its sewers. Skarsgård’s portrayal of Pennywise, Stephen King’s infamous dancing clown, is a masterclass in uncanny theatricality and the magic of leaning into the absurd. Lots of ink has been spilled about Skarsgård’s performance in both the original 2017 It as well as its 2020 sequel, but the bone-chilling effects of that stretched-out, creeptastic smile truly never dim. What even real-life killer clown John Wayne Gacy needed makeup to accomplish, Skarsgård can just … do, with his own face, on command. (It’s pretty goosebump-inducing, even in this out-of-costume interview with Stephen Colbert.)

Few actors are able to transcend their own humanity quite like Skarsgård. He doesn’t just gesture at the uncanny valley, he plunges right through it—with rubbery, boneless limbs and that weird, atonal, nails on a chalkboard cadence that’s as silly as it is scary. He never relies on tropes—no creepy whispers or blood-curdling shrieks here—and clearly isn’t afraid to make a complete fool of himself.

As a viewer, it’s hard to know exactly what to do with this type of total commitment. Is it overwrought and cartoonish? Is it … sexy? (A thought many bravely shared in the wake of both films.) Even Skarsgård himself reportedly struggled with the toll of giving himself completely to the character, telling Entertainment Weekly that Pennywise used to visit him in “strange and vivid” dreams “every night,” and likening finally letting go of those “toxins” and “darkness” to experiencing an exorcism.

Still, to use Skarsgård’s own verbiage, the people were possessed. The actor next appeared in yet another Stephen King-adjacent title, this time as the mysterious and nameless “Kid” in Hulu’s Castle Rock, a portmanteau of many of the author’s stories. Full disclosure: I’ve never seen Castle Rock (it’s on the list). But the impact and utter eeriness of Skarsgård’s performance is more than apparent in just this short clip in which he only utters a total of four lines.

The sheer depth of Skarsgård’s range is clearly on display here. While Pennywise was an exercise in well-honed excess and in-your-face shock value, The Kid is all restrained, prickly tension. Skarsgård tells an entire life story in just the first 22 seconds of the above scene, through darting eye contact, uneasy posture, and that perfect, subtle moment where he yanks the phone away from his face at the jarring sound of another voice. With zero context, even I felt a little prickly-skinned at his query of, “Has it begun?” and later, “Do you hear it now?” I don’t know what The Kid’s lawyer (André Holland) is supposed to be hearing, and it seems like he doesn’t either. Whatever force or entity Skarsgård’s character is channeling on camera, it’s clearly not one anyone who values their own life would want to meet.

Enter: Barbarian. (Now’s the time to stop scrolling and go watch the film if you haven’t seen it already. You’ve been warned.)

In a relatively short time, Skarsgård became so known for playing sick and depraved characters that the incredibly clever 2022 film used his casting as a twist in itself. The film starts off in pretty well-trod territory. Two strangers—Skarsgård’s Keith and Georgina Campbell’s Tess—are accidentally double-booked at an Airbnb in a run-down Detroit neighborhood on a dark and stormy night. Tess decides to stay the night despite her—and the audience’s—growing unease about Keith’s presence. He seems sweet and well-meaning but a little off-kilter … not to mention, of course, the fact that he’s a completely random man she’s been forced to share a home with. At this point, the audience’s internal alarm bells are screaming. Sure, Keith offered Tess tea and seemed genuinely concerned for her safety, but he’s Bill Skarsgård. He’s terrifying. He’s clearly going to murder, dismember, and possibly consume her in previously unheard of ways.

That’s … not what happens. I won’t reveal too much of the plot here (seriously, go watch it), but it’s somewhat quickly revealed that Skarsgård’s character never posed any threat whatsoever. It’s a brilliant turn, and one that the film probably couldn’t have pulled off to the same effect with any other actor. You need to be a little haunted—or at least have spent a past life dreaming of clowns—to play a horror villain to that level of precision without actually playing a villain at all.

The next time (or one of the next times) we see Skarsgård, he’ll be the iconic, blood-sucking Transylvanian Count Orlok in Robert Eggers’ long-gestating Nosferatu. Eggers’ bright career took a bit of a dip with 2022’s middling The Northman (starring Bill’s famous older brother Alexander), and prep for this movie hadn’t exactly gone well before Skarsgård signed on. “It’s fallen apart twice,” Eggers told IndieWire last year of his cursed-feeling remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent, expressionist film. “And I just wonder if Murnau’s ghost is telling me, like, you should stop,” he continued.

It doesn’t feel like too much of a stretch to say that maybe the spirit of the original director was just waiting for Bill Skarsgård all along.