Alexander Skarsgård had a woven mask glued to his face and Olivia Colman sitting across from him, and almost nothing he did was registering. A slight frown read as nothing. The subtlety he had spent a career building was disappearing into the reeds.
So directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer gave him a number.
"They're like, 'No, but check the monitor. It'll read. You just have to up it by 45%, everything you do, and then it'll read more subtle,'" Skarsgård said during an Oct. 19 press conference for "Wicker." At first, he said, it felt horrible. "I'm sitting here with Olivia Colman and I'm like being a clown."
On screen, it doesn't look like clowning at all. It looks like a man made of basketry falling in love.
"Wicker," the comedic fable from Black Bear, stars Colman as the Fisherwoman, a village outcast who commissions a husband from the local Basketmaker, played by Peter Dinklage. Skarsgård plays the creation. Elizabeth Debicki, Marli Siu, Nabhaan Rizwan and Richard E. Grant co-star. Adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones' short story "The Wicker Husband," the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 24, opened in limited release Oct. 23 and expanded nationwide Oct. 30.
Strip away the weaving, and "Wicker" makes a simple argument that lands like a dare: the best husband in the village is the only one who pays attention.
Eighteen months to build a man
The Wicker Husband is not a digital effect. Wilson and Fischer brought in New Zealand's Wētā Workshop, the shop behind the practical craft on "The Lord of the Rings" and "Avatar," about 18 months before cameras rolled.
"On a movie of this ... like an independent movie like this, that is unheard of to have 18 months to do R&D and design work," Fischer said.
Skarsgård said a team of 30 to 40 artists worked on the suit. The breakthrough was weaving on the bias across the forehead, which let the brow contract and expand like skin.
"So much of the emotion comes through the brow," Fischer said. "The biggest challenge of this is to see the actor's performance through the prosthetic."
When Skarsgård signed on six or seven months before the shoot, Wētā studied his cheekbones and brow line and wove them into the pattern, what Fischer called "the Skarsgårdiness of the character."
Skarsgård's first reaction to wearing it? "Panic and claustrophobia," he said. Then the character he had carried in his head for a year was suddenly real. Colman happened to be at the studio that day. "Stepping out of the makeup trailer and seeing Olivia for the first time, I was like, 'Meeting your husband, hi.'"
Colman said acting opposite the real thing, instead of a balaclava with tracking dots, changed everything. "All credit to Alex because to get the love and the nuance and the humor and all of that through basically a basket is incredible," she said, "and not many people could have done it."
The man with the handbag
Asked what the film says about masculinity, Skarsgård kept it plain. The Wicker Husband "pays attention to his partner and her needs, and he doesn't see her as an extension of him or his desires or ambitions," he said. "So basic, just pay attention."
Colman put it in pop terms. "I love to point out to people the one that everybody fancies is the attentive, gentle, kind man in the film," she said. "Harry Styles gets all the women. He's the man with the handbag."
For Skarsgård, the role was also a break from his recent run of darker, morally conflicted men. "The character has a purity to him that was extraordinarily foreign to me," he said. "It was fun to be the good guy for a change."
She wasn't lonely, she was done with them
Colman rejected the idea that the Fisherwoman orders a husband out of loneliness. She is the only woman in the village with her own job and her own money, Colman said, and probably more at ease with herself than anyone around her.
"I think one too many jibes meant she ordered herself her husband, not for loneliness, but to tell them all to shut up," she said. "And I love how the village unravel when she's got what they want suddenly."
That unraveling is the film's engine. Fischer said every villager gets a glimpse of what the Wicker Husband offers, then talks themselves out of it, like the men in the tavern who nearly learn something before turning on him.
"They came so close to learning something," Wilson said.
Written two months into a marriage
Wilson and Fischer are married, and they wrote "Wicker" in Adelaide, Australia, during COVID, only a few months after their wedding.
"It's kind of bold to write a take-down of the institution of marriage when you've only been married for a couple of months," Fischer said. They had been writing their vows right up until they started the screenplay.
Wilson said much of herself went into the Fisherwoman, especially the fireside scene the couple calls the "flammable hearts" scene. Early in their relationship, she said, she had moments of jealousy and panic and tried to push Fischer away. The script describes the Fisherwoman in that moment: "The fisherwoman hates who she's become right now, but now she started, she can't stop."
Wilson said she believes the take in the film is Colman's first. "Every little detail that's written into the script, she wholeheartedly brings," Wilson said.
'Too weird' to pitch, then the internet found it
The directors said they were told repeatedly the project was "too weird and doesn't fit into any categories," so they wrote it before trying to sell it and financed it with independent backers they trusted.
Then the internet took over. The early press release went viral. The first poster of Skarsgård's woven face blew up on Reddit. The trailer caught fire on BookTok, which Fischer called "a powerful force in cinema," along with a fan subgenre of sentient-object romances the couple didn't know existed.
The sex scenes were written for laughs. Colman told the directors she was "a bit of a prude," and intimacy coordinator Ita O'Brien, a friend of Colman's, choreographed the scenes.
"We planned on it just being for comedy and then, it ended up being pretty hot when we shot it," Fischer said.
The film's one fully nude shot of the Wicker Husband, standing in a river and seen from a distance, was in the script from the first draft. Wētā built the upper body. Costume designers András Dániel Tóth and Attila Godena-Juhász wove the rest.
Dinklage came aboard after his agent slipped him the script. The directors got a forwarded email: "I love it. I'm in." On set, Fischer said, Dinklage had his own rule. "The rule of comedy is you bend it, don't break it. But on this one, I might break it."
The five-minute audition
Colman said the chemistry between her and Skarsgård needed no building. "We take our work seriously, but not ourselves," she said.
Skarsgård agreed. He said the two never once stopped to ask how the other saw a scene. "It just felt like we were making the same movie."
Fischer saved the last word for his lead. Before the shoot, the directors set aside 15 minutes to talk character with Skarsgård and asked him to read a couple of poems. He read the first one.
"We said, 'We don't even need the rest of the 15 minutes,'" Fischer said. "'We just needed the five.'"
It is the film's whole thesis, delivered by its directors without meaning to. They listened. They paid attention. And they knew.
"Wicker" is in theaters now.
