Alexander Skarsgard Stars in the Dark Comedy Wicker

This article is part of a directory: Happily Never After: A Week of Adult Fairy Tales

In Wicker, Olivia Colman plays an unloved fisherwoman who asks Peter Dinklage, a magically endowed basket-maker, to weave her a husband. The Wicker Husband is stoic yet pliable, a dutiful force of nature in bed or with a hammer, and as tall and handsome as the tree he is made from. The women of the village stare with lust as he walks creakily by. There was really only one option when casting this creature, and luckily, the producers of this sly, saucy fable got their man.

Alexander Skarsgård is an expert at sending up or subverting his own studly image while also completely embodying it. In the 2025 S&M romance Pillion, he deftly exposed the emotional weakness of a strapping, leather-clad biker dom. In Wicker, he achieves something similar but more tender, which is all the more remarkable for being summoned from somewhere within an assemblage of practical and digital creature effects.

Wicker, written and directed by Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer, is set in a fairy-tale village that seems to exist somewhere between the Middle Ages and the late Victorian period. The villagers, played by a team of British comic actors, speak in a mixture of dirty jokes and strangely mannered aphorisms. They have no names and refer to each other by their archetypal roles in the little society: Butcher, Doctor, Baker, Innkeeper, Tailor’s Wife. Colman’s rude, stinky, and unmarried Fisherwoman is the only woman who owns her own title rather than taking it from her husband.

Observing the twisted marriage traditions of the villagers, which involve clamping an iron collar around the bride’s neck on their wedding day, the Fisherwoman decides to send them up with her Wicker husband prank. Or, maybe, she is responding to a deeper, lonelier impulse. Either way, she gets more than she bargained for.

The villagers titter at her freakish new spouse, but they cannot help but notice his pure devotion to the Fisherwoman, and have a pretty good idea of his sexual prowess too. "He straightened me right out," says Colman, in one of her trademark line-readings. This starts to sow discord, much to the displeasure of the Tailor’s Wife (an imperious Elizabeth Debicki), the village’s queen bee and steely arbiter of social norms.

This is basic social satire, and viewers can anticipate where it is going. That works for a fable like Wicker, where subtlety takes a backseat to symbolism. There is no shortage of symbolic power in the Wicker Husband, a creation that seamlessly blends fantastic prosthetic makeup with digital effects by Weta, ensuring viewers can see the sun shimmer through his empty lattice of willow strips. Most importantly, he is unmistakably Skarsgård, and the actor’s gentle performance shines through the artifice.

Wicker is a ribald, funny movie that misses few opportunities to go for a punchline, and casting Skarsgård is part of the joke. He wisely pretends he does not know this and plays the Wicker Husband dead straight. The point of the character is that he is a locus of purity and strength that the jealous, fallible villagers lose their heads over. It is also important to the movie that he not be dominant. He has been summoned as a rebuke to the village’s suffocating patriarchy and exists to serve the woman he loves.

Skarsgård plays him with a halting but steadfast tenderness that first melts away the Fisherwoman’s defensive carelessness, then the obedient self-negation of the village women, and then the masculine self-image of the village men. It does not go well for the villagers, and the story takes a dark, even heartbreaking turn for a while. Then the Fisherwoman and the Wicker Husband enlist the Basketmaker for a bitter fairy-tale revenge.

Wicker‘s feminist point is blunt. The patriarchal system has corrupted society so thoroughly that a nice man cannot exist, so it is necessary to invent one. Stories like Wicker exist to throw our world into sharp, comical, outlandish relief: to show us as our worst selves and give us our just desserts. If you are one of the good ones, your just desserts might just include Alexander Skarsgård as a hot tree.

Source: Polygon