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Bill Skarsgard in Hemlock Grove (Netflix)
"So, what's it like living on abandoned island with your vampire family?" The Observer asked 22-year-old Bill Skarsgård, star of the new Netflix original series Hemlock Grove. (Out today! Consume it!) We were at No. 8, where the lanky Mr. Skarsgård was partying with his co-star, Landon Liboiron, and the show's co-creator, Brian McGreevy, who also wrote the book on which the series is based.
Mr. Skarsgård looked slightly offended. "We don't live on an island," he said.
Our bad: We thought we had read it somewhere, like in the 2011 GQ interview that described father Stellan Skarsgård as follows:
Think George Clooney—if George Clooney was the only internationally famous actor in an entire country with a tradition of revering actors.
This was mostly a set-up to explain why the eight Skarsgård children spent their vacations on a private family island (try not to think about Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) in Öland, next to the Baltic sea.
"It's connected to the mainland by a bridge," Mr. Skarsgård said in his defense.
"That still counts as an island," we told him.
It says something that the heavy-lidded, thick-lipped actor chose to argue semantics over the whole island thing, we thought. Especially because his older brother, Alexander Skarsgård, happens to be one of the most famous vampires in the world right now, playing Eric Northman on True Blood. On Hemlock Grove, Bill follows in his brother's footsteps, playing the aristocratic, Oedipal (and a lot of other things) teen vampire Roman Godfrey.
When pressed, Mr. Skarsgård revealed his true form. "Yeah, we're a family of vampires, Swedish vampires, being bred on a secret island," he said.
Finally, the truth! But here was the real test of whether he could go toe-to-toe with his brother and father: how was his American accent?
"Pretty bad. I have this kind of bullshit accent that I've made up," he said, sounding vaguely European. "Swedish is a sexy language, but the Swedish accent is the most unsexy thing in the world."
Still, a family of tall, brooding, Swedish vampires? One could find a worse family to marry into.
