Alexander Skarsgard Makes Sex Symbolism Feel Unsettling

By Tom Whitfield

In 2013, Alexander Skarsgard told E! Online: “I’m an actor, not a sex symbol.” That claim offers a practical test for his screen work: physical appeal should deepen a character rather than replace characterization.

The test is harder than the wording suggests. The source sets a broad argument about many roles, but this excerpt names only one film for sustained analysis. Its central evidence is The Wicker Husband, in which Skarsgard plays a beautiful man constructed from wood. The performance attracts desire, then makes that desire strange. That is more specific, and more useful, than simply calling the actor “eye candy.”

For many of his fans, the note presents Skarsgard’s blond, towering appearance as a “living, breathing thirst trap.” The note’s larger thesis is that he reverses the usual equation of sex with intimacy. His more unusual roles make sexuality seem unnatural, inhuman and sometimes violent.

The excerpt names no other film or scene with which to test that wider claim. It supports a narrower proposition: Skarsgard can make erotic appeal feel like a threat to ordinary intimacy. The Wicker Husband provides the detailed case, with a carved husband whose erotic charge depends on friction, incomprehension and social unease.

The man made of wood

The reaction to The Wicker Husband began with its first trailer, according to the note, when the image of Skarsgard as a wicker man prompted an online flurry. No release date or trailer platform appears in the excerpt. The important detail is the premise: Olivia Colman plays a lonely fisherwoman who asks an expert weaver, played by Peter Dinklage, to build her a husband.

The result is described as a colossal work of art. Wicker forms the figure’s muscles and contours in ornate wooden patterns. His blue eyes peer from beneath long lashes in his woven face. The design satisfies the eye before it reveals the character’s limits. Beauty is part of the construction, not evidence of a fully human being.

The village men resent him because he appears to be the perfect spouse and draws the sexual attention of the village wives. He completes chores, repairs the house and serves as a magnificent lover. The note does not specify the sexual acts that earn the last description. It does make the social arrangement clear: the husband’s desirability makes him an object of envy before he becomes a person in his own right.

Desire and machinery

The constant scraping noise that accompanies the Wicker Husband’s every movement prevents the fantasy from becoming seamless. Every movement carries the sound of the material rather than living flesh. The film does not let the figure pass as human merely because the fisherwoman treats him as a lover.

The figure also lacks a basic understanding of human behavior. That incompleteness matters more than the exaggerated physique. The source describes him as a fabrication throughout, and the noise and limited understanding keep reminding the viewer of the construction behind the image. Sexual attraction can survive that knowledge, but it cannot remain entirely comfortable.

The fisherwoman’s orgasmic screams provide the excerpt’s bluntest test. The note reads them as evidence that, within this fantasy world, wood can replace human flesh. The reading is deliberately extreme, and it exposes the story’s central gamble: it asks viewers to accept erotic release from a figure whose physical and behavioral defects are the basis of the performance.

There is also a limit to the evidence. The wider claim about unnatural, inhuman and violent sexuality rests on roles the excerpt does not identify. Only The Wicker Husband is examined here, and its most concrete effects are mechanical sound, social resentment and incomplete behavior. To turn a single striking performance into a pattern, a wider survey of roles would need to show that the same unsettling effect persists without relying on Skarsgard’s appearance alone.

What does this change for viewers of Skarsgard?

For viewers, the change is not that Skarsgard stops being a sex symbol. It is that his appeal stops working as a simple promise of fantasy. In The Wicker Husband, beauty makes the husband desirable, while scraping, incomprehension and resentment puncture that desire. The actor’s strongest quality in the excerpt is his ability to make looking at him part of the unease rather than only part of the pleasure.

That makes the career claim worth testing, not accepting by default. The broader pattern will stand only if other roles complicate attraction in similarly concrete ways. On the evidence supplied here, Skarsgard’s appeal matters because the film makes it mechanical, social and uncertain, not because it is flawless.