Killing time

WHAT do sex-crazed vampires and bored US marines have in common? They’re both the subject of back-to-back shows on C4 which star Alexander Skarsgard.

The Swedish actor – son of Mamma Mia! star Stellan Skarsgard – has roles in HBO series Generation Kill and True Blood, currently shown consecutively on Wednesday nights.

He plays True Blood’s Eric Northman and Sgt Brad “Iceman” Colbert in Generation Kill.

He may be described as a rising star now, but the truth is he’s already had one successful acting career. He retired in 1989 when he hit the ripe old age of 13.

“I did my first movie when I was seven, and then I worked for about six years, doing movies and television in Sweden,”

he says. “But then I quit, and didn’t work at all for seven years.

“Back then in good old Sweden, we only had two TV channels, so whatever was on, people would watch. I did a movie for television there and it had a huge impact.

Suddenly, people recognised me wherever I went and it just made me very uncomfortable.

“It was a weird age to become famous.

I didn’t know how to handle it and I was very self-conscious and stressed out about the whole situation. I just wanted to be one of the guys, so I quit.”

With his famous father – who’s starred in films such as Ronin, Exorcist: The Beginning, Good Will Hunting and Angels And Demons – you might think he’d have received some tips on dealing with fame, but his celebrity preceded his father’s who, in the late Eighties, was a jobbing actor in Stockholm theatres.

“He wasn’t that big a star when I grew up. The thing that took him to Hollywood was Breaking The Waves, the Lars von Trier movie, in 1996. I was already 20 years old by that point,” says Skarsgard.

“Growing up, he was mostly a stage actor, and although he did movies as well, they were small Swedish ones.

“I’ve got younger siblings, and it was different for them. They did more of the travelling around the world, being on sets and all of that exotic stuff. For me, it was running around backstage at the theatre.”

Generation Kill was penned by David Simon and Ed Burns, creators of The Wire. They adapted the seven-part series from Evan Wright’s 2004 memoir, written about his time with an elite Marine unit, the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“Everything on the show happened in real life,” says Skarsgard. “One of the actors (Rudy Reyes) is a real Marine, and plays himself in the show. We had two other guys from 1st Recon with us for the duration of the shoot, which was seven months in South Africa.

“They were behind the camera for every single take, every single day, making sure that everything was legit and was real. It was very important to us to show exactly what happened and not make it into a Hollywood movie where everything is dramatised and things are added or removed.

“We wanted to tell it exactly as it was, and I hope we succeeded in doing that.”

HE may not be deputy prime minister any more, but John Prescott is still dealing with the big issues.

Last year, he made a documentary examining the class system in Britain and now he’s tackling another contentious topic – England’s supposed North/South divide.

Things might have moved on from the days when the popular stereotype was that the terraced streets in the North were inhabited by flat cap-wearing whippet owners, and Southerners were either chirpy cockneys or hooray Henrys, but many people believe that significant economic and social differences still exist.

In Prescott: The North/South Divide, Prescott and his wife, Pauline, canvass the population on their attitudes on everything from accents and culture, to whether there’s any truth in the traditional view that London is unfriendly.

They also discover that figures concerning health, wealth and employment don’t always reflect people’s experiences.