This is a suit I wore while filming On Becoming a God in Central Florida. The guy I play, Travis Stubbs, works in an office cubicle in the early 90s. He is stuck in a job he hates and not happy about where he is in life, but he has aspirations. He wants to look like a successful businessman but he doesn’t have much style or taste. Bad style in the early 90s gives you a plethora of horrible, horrible outfits. It was one of my favourite characters to create in terms of the look and the hair. It’s always fun when you create a character who looks different from the way they feel. He has bought into a pyramid scheme, so in order to recruit more people he wants to look important and successful. We had a lot of fun putting together some ostentatious and quite tacky outfits, culminating in a very ill-fitting tuxedo.
Going to costume fittings is always instrumental, for me, in finding the character. I spend hours thinking: “What kind of shoe would this guy wear? What kind of jacket?” It’s always a collaboration between me and the costume designer and I will agonise over an outfit – if I find a great pair of shoes, but they are slightly the wrong colour, that can bother me a lot.
In my personal life, I don’t pay much attention to what I wear – it’s the other end of the spectrum and I like to just switch off. I don’t have the energy to spend more than two minutes thinking about it in the morning and so I pretty much wear the same thing every day. That is not to say I’m not interested in clothes – it can be fun to dress up for an event – but that’s a special occasion. I never “put together an outfit” if I’m just running around New York or Stockholm. I have always been allergic to clothes that are not comfortable – as much as I love the look of a wool sweater, I can’t wear them because they’re too itchy. I gravitate towards soft fabrics.
Alexander Skarsgård is the face of the new global campaign from Clarks shoes.
