Actor Stellan Skarsgård will receive the Leopard Club Award at the 76th Locarno Film Festival taking place August 2-12, 2023.
Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the Locarno Film Festival: “Stellan Skarsgård belongs to the tradition of European actors who have distinguished themselves between auteur cinema and Hollywood. Endowed with a very powerful stage charisma, he has been able to make every role he has played unforgettable. Capable of reinventing his character according to the needs of the director and the script, he was able to inject his personality into films that were extremely different from each other. A central figure in the cinema of recent decades, the Locarno Film Festival is proud to present the Leopard Club Award to an actor of such absolute value and with such an extremely important filmography as Stellan Skarsgård.”
The award ceremony will be followed by a talk with the audience and a screening of God afton, herr Wallenberg (Good evening, Mr. Wallenberg, 1990) by Kjell Grede. Stellan Skarsgård and Gustaf Skarsgård (Vikings, Westworld and Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Oppenheimer), will be in Locarno to present the film they star in, What Remains, selected in Fuori concorso, with director Ran Huang and co-writer Megan Everett-Skarsgård.
Stellan Skarsgård began acting at an early age and became a Swedish television star as the lead in the children’s series Bombi Bitt (1968). In 1982 he won the Silver Bear for Best Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival for his role in Den Enfaldige mördaren (The Simple Minded Murderer, Hans Alfredson, 1982), which brought him international attention.
He then began his Hollywood career starring in films and working with top directors such as Steven Spielberg’s Amistad (1997), Gus Van Sant’s Good Will Hunting (1997), Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean (2006-2007) films, both Mamma Mia! (2008-2018) films for Universal, Miloš Forman’s Goya’s Ghosts (2006), Antoine Fuqua’s King Arthur (2004), Ron Howard’s Angels and Demons (2009), The 2 Thor and 2 Avenger’s films for Marvel, David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella (2015), Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) and, most recently, Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021), the sequel which is coming out this Autumn.
During this time he constantly returned to Europe to continue his work starring in films with leading independent filmmakers – such as Lars von Trier with whom he has worked with 5 times in Breaking the Waves (1996), which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, Dancer in the Dark (2000), Dogville (2003), Melancholia (2011) and Nymphomaniac (2013) and Hans Petter Moland in 5 films they have made together – Kjærlighetens kjøtere (Zero Kelvin, 1995), Aberdeen (2000), En ganske snill mann (A Somewhat Gentle Man, 2010), Kraftidioten (In Order of Disappearance, 2014) and Ut og stjæle hester (Out Stealing Horses, 2019). Other films of note are Maria Sodahl’s Håp (Hope, 2019), Vaclav Varhoul’s Nabarvené ptáče (The Painted Bird, 2019), Volker Schlöndorff’s Rückkehr nach Montauk (Return to Montauk, 2017) and Marius Holst’s Kongen av Bastøy (King of the Devil’s Island, 2010). In 2019, he won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor in a miniseries in the HBO drama Chernobyl. He recently starred in Tony Gilroy’s hit spin off Star Wars show Andor (2022) for Disney+, the second series of which he has just finished shooting.