Stellan Skarsgard Joined Mamma Mia! Because He Got to Play a “Bimbo”

Stellan Skarsgard revealed that he was hesitant to star in Mamma Mia!, but once he realized he just had to “look cute and be silly,” he was all in.

The veteran actor recently admitted to Vanity Fair that he was initially taken aback when asked to be in the 2008 movie musical with Meryl Streep and Amanda Seyfried because he can’t sing or dance.

“It was absurd to ask me to be in a musical,” Skarsgard said. “I can’t sing, I can’t dance. And then I saw it was also Pierce Brosnan and Colin Firth, and they can’t sing and dance either, so I felt a little safer there.”

In Mamma Mia!, Sophie (Seyfried) sets out to find her real father before her wedding day as her mother Donna (Streep) had been intimate with three men (Skarsgard, Brosnan and Firth), right before she got pregnant with Sophie. The movie was an adaptation of the stage musical of the same name and featured hit songs from ABBA. Skarsgard also returned for the 2018 sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.

The Dune: Part Two actor said when he learned that he, Brosnan and Firth were just supposed to be these good-looking “bimbos” in the movie, he was completely sold on the project.

“I understood that we were just supposed to be — like in a film that is produced by men and directed by men and men in the leads, you have the bimbo — and we were the bimbos in this female production,” he explained. “We didn’t have to be anything but look cute and be silly. There’s only one thing that was asked of us and that was, ‘Have fun because if we don’t have fun, it won’t be a film.’”

Skarsgard also recalled he and Firth at least attempted to work on their singing and dancing skills but didn’t have much luck.

“Me and Colin coming to dance lessons, in our slacks and our little Paul Smith shirts and everything, and 60 dancers that are dressed up like dancers are,” the actor said. “We really tried for a month and a half, trying to dance to ‘Voulez-Vous’, and we failed.’”

In another interview this week with Business Insider, Skarsgard also looked back at another one of his big projects he starred in: the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.

With Dune: Part Two hitting theaters on Friday, which sees the actor transform into villainous Baron Vladimir thanks to hours in a make-up chair, Skarsgard recalled also sitting in make-up for hours for his role as barnacle-covered Bootstrap Bill in the Johnny Depp-led movies. But he admitted that he chose to wear prosthetics for that role rather than relying on CGI like other actors did.

“I was the only one on set with real prosthetics on,” he told the outlet. “Everyone else on that ship showed up five minutes before we started shooting and had dots put on their face, and away they went. I had been there for six hours. But the thing is, I like it. I like to see the artists paint, if that makes sense.”

Skarsgard starred in 2006’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and 2007’s Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.