Fresh from his stint as the sadistic GoJo tech bro in Succession, Alexander Skarsgård is on to his next big-budget limited-series TV show: the Amazon Prime Video re-up of 2005’s Mr and Mrs Smith.
Skarsgård was announced back in December as having a guest role in the Donald Glover and Maya Erskine-fronted TV series, and fans of the Swede tuning in to the series will have been hyped to see him in the opening minutes of the spy thriller. However, that’s literally all they got from the actor – 187 seconds, to be precise; or 46 words of dialogue – before he carked it.
And that’s… it? As he and his wife, presumably fugitives, decide to stop running and take on the masked intruders in a shootout, they both end up on the wrong side of a gun within four minutes. It’s a short standalone scene separated from the rest of the episode, which covers how Glover and Erskine become the fake married secret agent couple, John and Jane Smith. So was that either John or Jane as one of the masked gun-toters? It’s unclear, as is the question of whether we’ll get the full context of this scene later on the series, and if Skarsgård will return from the dead as a flashback to explain what the hell just went on.
The reason for Skarsgård’s swift appearance is likely to be down to the decision to regularly feature guest actors in the series. As first announced back in June 2022, the co-creators Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane (who took over from Phoebe Waller-Bridge, after she departed the production in 2021 due to “creative differences”) wanted to pepper their remake with as many famous faces as possible. Michaela Coel, John Turturro, and Paul Dano were the first people announced, followed by a second wave of stars including Eiza González, Sarah Paulson, Sharon Horgan, Ron Perlman, Billy Campbell, Parker Posey, Wagner Moura, Úrsula Corberó, and Skarsgård.
Related Story
With just eight episodes in the series, that’s a great deal of actors to get through in a relatively tight screen time, which will have been a factor in the casting. As will Skarsgård’s previous appearance in Glover’s critically acclaimed series, Atlanta. But taking an actor of Skarsgård’s calibre and notoriety, and making the punchy decision to kill him off just a couple of minutes in the series definitely turns audience expectation on its head. The co-creators fighting for a point of differentiation from the original film, and like the undercover agents in the series, they’re going for the jugular from the very start.
Laura Martin is a freelance journalist specializing in pop culture.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7pr%2FQrqCrnV6YvK571KRmnK2cqcKzsY6aa29taWp%2FdX6OspysZaSdrrV5yKxkmqSVra6vsMSrZKyjkafAqK3RnWSipl2iv26tzZ1kpqqjYsCutdOhZK6spJq%2FqrrGZphmrJ%2Bprq15zp9kbW5drLyzsNJo