Stellan Skarsgård is a happy, diligent "bimbo" on the Dune 2 press tour

Even if Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two wasn’t producing both rave reviews, and every indicator of a great opening weekend at the box office, it might still have already justified its existence with its press tour—and, specifically, the Stellan Skarsgård portions of said press tour. After nearly 60 years in the industry, Skarsgård is an almost preternaturally good interview subject, thoughtful, funny, self-effacing, and willing to get as high-brow or low-brow as a conversational moment requires. (Which is to say, he’ll talk as easily about his love of his craft as he will the fact that he had to slam Imodium every morning to keep himself from “shitting and peeing for a week” beneath his extensive Baron Harkonnen prosthetics for Villeneuve’s film.)

If you need a more focused example, take a recent sitdown Skarsgård did with Vanity Fair, which walked through the long timeline of his career—and produced moments like his happy realization that he, Colin Firth, and Pierce Brosnan had been hired to be “bimbos” in Mamma Mia!. “We didn’t have to be anything but look cute and be silly. There’s only one thing that was asked of us and that was, ‘Have fun because if we don’t have fun, it won’t be a film.’” (He also said his fears of singing and dancing were alleviated when he realized he’d been cast alongside Firth and Brosnan because “they can’t sing and dance either.” Stellan Skarsgård: Funny.)

Elsewhere in that conversation, Skarsgård rolls his eyes a bit at his Marvel work, while also expressing sincere joy for his time on the original Thor, which he spent a large portion of sitting in a fake car with Kat Dennings and Natalie Portman and listening to them talk about guys. “You learn so much about girls,” he says, catching a cackle from someone off screen. “I didn’t think it was like that.” (We would rather watch two hours of those conversations, honestly, than catch another screening of Kenneth Branagh’s actual movie.)

And that’s before we even get into Skarsgård’s odd affection for prosthetics: In an anecdote he’s told in a few different places, he revealed that, for his role in 2006's Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, he was the only member of his haunted crew who asked to have practical effects done on him, arriving at 2 in the morning to be decked out in kelp and tentacles, while the rest of the crew strolled in 5 minutes before filming to get their mo-cap suits on. “I like to see the artists paint,” he told Business Insider, even as he acknowledged what a pain the process can be.

Anyway: Do yourself a favor, and get a hit of Skarsgård while the getting’s good, whether it’s him gently mocking David Fincher for making The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo as a “Swedish independent for $100 million,” or praising Villeneuve as a “great cinematic poet.”