Alexander Skarsgård is a good-looking guy. In fact he’s built a career around playing handsome dudes on the big and small screen. However, he threw it all away for a recent role, after shaving his head for The Hummingbird Project.
During an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Alexander Skarsgård recalled the paparazzi giving him sympathy after seeing him with an unfortunately shaved head at an event while the movie in question was still filming. He said,
The great thing was, when I stepped out of the car and there was this press line, with photographers. I stepped out and I’ll never forget the sound when they all saw me, because they all went, ‘Awww.’ Someone was like, ‘Is he OK?’ They thought I had a meltdown.
Obviously, the intent was not to freak out the paparazzi, but Skarsgard did say he’ll never forgot what happened the one time he left the set in the three months he was shooting The Hummingbird Project as a balding man. But he was adamant with his stylists that he was unwilling to be a hat guy at an event. The rest is history.
So, why not just use a bald cap in the first place for the movie? Luckily, Alexander Skarsgård actually revealed to Jimmy Fallon how the whole thing came about.
I wanted to be bald and I thought for some reason it would look more natural, instead of doing a bald cap to just really shave it. I didn’t realize that it doesn’t quite look real, natural – see, the hairline doesn’t work.
If you look at the image at the top of this story or check out the original paparazzi event, you can see how Alexander Skarsgård's "balding" doesn't totally look like he's actually balding. The lines are kind of funny, but regardless of their complete authenticity, the look certainly does change the actor's face quite a bit.
While Jesse Eisenberg got to keep his hair for The Hummingbird Project, Alexander Skarsgård was certainly not his usual handsome self. Instead, he plays Anton, one of two cousins (the other is played by Jesse Eisenberg) who quit their day jobs to try and build a competitive fibre optic cable across half of the continental United States. Anton is awkward, a programmer who generally goes along with his cousin's insistence. It's a role far removed from the True Blood gig that made him famous, or a lot of his more recent movie roles.
The Hummingbird Project isn't the first time the actor has changed his hair in Hollywood. It was big news when he added a mustache back in 2017 after appearing on HBO's Big Little Lies.
In addition, if you haven’t caught Alexander Skarsgård full visit to The Tonight Show, you can watch the full video below.
The good news, these days his full head of hair is back, particularly in this weekend’s Long Shot, in which he plays Canada’s Prime Minister opposite Charlize Theron’s Secretary of State character. He's recognizable in that movie, although there is one other actor in a lot of makeup you may not recognize.
Long Shot hits theaters today.
