“Is that this one of the best ways to advertise a movie?” a reporter requested Alexander Skarsgård years in the past on the 2023 Sundance premiere of Infinity Pool, an occasion to which the actor wore a tasteful crewneck sweater and a leashed leather-based canine collar.
“I don’t know,” the actor, whose icy attractiveness, 6’4” stature, and terse Scandinavian nature, all the time brings a sure freaky vibe to the operate that retains all people on their toes, deadpanned in reply. He added, with a sly smile, “It’s a sizzling look.”
(The accent was, actually, thematic; there are leash-centric moments within the movie, which was directed by the unnerving-by-blood director Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg.)
Nonetheless, it’s a promotional technique that Skarsgård continued to stay with on the 2025 Cannes Movie Competition, which kicked off in southern France final week. This yr, the Swedish actor is selling the upcoming drama Pillion, wherein his character, the chief of a queer biker gang, begins up a dom-sub relationship with a newcomer performed by the British actor Harry Melling, who’s most broadly recognizable for portraying Dudley Dursley within the Harry Potter movies. (Per a current interview with Vainness Truthful, when Skarsgård first realized about this venture, he “undoubtedly needed to placed on the leather-based gear and bounce into the trenches with it.”)
Working with the movie star stylist Harry Lambert, whose shopper roster additionally contains Harry Types and Emma Corrin, Skarsgård dressed strategically in an off-the-cuff, kink-forward search for a Pillion screening: black leather-based pants and biker boots by Loewe, darkish aviator shades from Linda Farrow, and an ’80s-era tee printed with an illustration of a supine man licking the only of a leather-based boot. In a while, contained in the theater—the place the movie obtained a seven-minute standing ovation—Skarsgård embraced a person in a pup hood, who revealed himself on Instagram to be a real-life Welsh biker named Paul Tallis, a guide on the movie.
After the leather-based pants and classic bootlicker T-shirt, Skarsgård upped the ante for the red-carpet premiere of Wes Anderson’s newest movie, The Phoenician Scheme, in a festishistic Saint Laurent look—a haughty double-breasted tuxedo jacket paired with thigh-high black leather-based boots— from designer Anthony Vacarello’s fall 2025 menswear assortment, which imagined a fictional ’80s linkup between Yves Saint Laurent and the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. (Assume boardroom by day, BDSM dungeon by evening.)
