Stellan Skarsgård sees the value in having a good meal, especially while on set. The actor said during the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, via Variety, that he opted to take a half-million kroner pay cut (about $50,000 USD) for Joachim Trier’s “Sentimental Value” to ensure the crew received good lunches from craft services.
“I wasn’t supposed to be [an executive producer] at first, but I said, ‘I’d never film in Norway without having a special contract.’ After [Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 1997 film] ‘Insomnia,’ I gathered the whole crew and said, ‘I’ll never film in this country again – unless we get a good lunch,’” Skarsgård said. “I lost eight kilos on ‘Insomnia.’ We would usually get a loaf of bread, that’s pre-sliced, and a plastic salami. That’s it! I’ve made other films in Norway since then, but it has always said in my contract that everybody should get lunches of the highest European standard. And that’s expensive. Norway, they’re the richest country, but they don’t want to spend money on food.”
Skarsgård’s poor experience on “Insomnia” led him to take matters into his own hands for “Sentimental Value,” which won the Grand Prix at Cannes 2025 and is already a 2026 Oscar contender.
“I went down, I think, half a million kroner in my salary to pay for this, for the food for everybody,” he said. “And the producer said, ‘You’ll get credit for that.’ Also, the food has to be served on real china – no plastic, paper bags or whatever. And you’re not standing in line, you sit down and eat. It makes everybody happier and makes the film much better. I haven’t made one bad film in Norway since.”
Skarsgård compared his taste for food to his taste for films, saying, “There’s a lot of people who limit what they eat. ‘I’m not eating meat,’ they say. I eat everything. I have this appetite for life, but also, it’s not a genre that makes the film bad. It’s laziness. The American films I’ve made, they were made by really good directors. Like ‘Ronin’ with John Frankenheimer, ‘Dune’ with Denis Villeneuve or my first Marvel film. Unfortunately, I had to sign up for four of them. But the first one was directed by Kenneth Branagh!”
He continued, “They are valid projects, even if they are a part of the big system. What’s bad about the system is something that has to do with the neo-capitalistic society we live in, where everything is owned by investment firms. Like when AT&T, a fucking telephone company, took over Time Warner. A telephone company! And the head of AT&T, he said to the HBO people: ‘Now you quit this sort of arty-farty shit and start doing lighter fare so we can get our 15%.’ That’s horrible.”
Read IndieWire’s recent interview with Skarsgård about “Sentimental Value” here.