Here in Hollywood: Love, sex, and a basket: What makes ‘Wicker’ good

Olivia Colman has a theory about the human mind that explains a great deal about why we can spend an entire day feeling good about ourselves, only to have one passing remark ruin it. Give a person ten compliments and a single insult, she suggests, and the insult is likely to win. It is a bleak observation, made more so by how readily most of us recognize ourselves in it. For Colman, the solution has been to avoid social media altogether. “If I looked at it, I could see, you know, 10 nice things, but I would remember the one mean thing,” she says. “I just have to protect myself by pretending no one ever sees anything I do. I’m happier that way.”

Alexander Skarsgård knows the feeling. He avoids reading reviews of his films for much the same reason, wary of the power a stranger’s judgment can acquire once it gets inside his head. “I’ll read something, and I’ll be, like, really insecure about it, and that’ll be the thing I remember,” he says. For an actor, there is a particular vulnerability in releasing a performance into the world, where something made through months of work and collaboration becomes available for public approval or dismissal. “I want to protect the experience of shooting the movie. Of having that be it,” he says. Once a film is released, he prefers to let it go.

We’re at the Black Bear Studios in Santa Monica, and we’re talking about “Wicker,” the new film from married writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer. A unique romantic fable about a woman who commissions a husband made of basketry, the film is full of physical absurdity, sexy surprises, and some hard truths about love. Yet beneath its fantastical premise lies a familiar predicament: how difficult it can be to believe that we deserve the things we most want, especially when the world has spent years suggesting otherwise.

Colman plays the Fisherwoman, an independent woman living on the outskirts of an unnamed village, where her occupation, appearance, and unmarried status have made her an object of ridicule. She has built a life that appears to suit her, with work to do and little apparent interest in the approval of her neighbors. When circumstances prompt her to consider marriage, she takes the unusual step of commissioning the local Basketmaker, played by Peter Dinklage, to create a husband for her. The result is a strikingly handsome man, brought to life by Skarsgård, whose goodness proves as disarming as his appearance.

Their relationship sets off a chain of jealousies and social upheavals, exposing the anxieties that underpin the village’s seemingly settled order. The Fisherwoman’s transformation begins when someone loves her with an openness she has never quite learned to extend to herself.

Wilson and Fischer spent four years developing the film, adapting Ursula Wills’s short story “The Wicker Husband” into a feature that could accommodate its peculiar combination of comedy, fairy-tale roots, and emotional sincerity. In their directors’ statement, they describe the central idea as something they recognize from their own closest relationships: accepting love requires a person to confront the possibility that they are worthy of it. The idea is simple enough to sound obvious until one considers how many people spend their lives trying to prove themselves deserving of affection they already have.

The character’s physical appearance is central to the story’s examination of worth. The village has assigned her a place in its social hierarchy according to standards she never agreed to follow, and her new husband disrupts those standards simply by loving her. His affection challenges the assumption that a woman’s value depends on how closely she conforms to an ideal. Yet the film is interested in what happens after that assumption begins to crumble, when a person who has spent years surviving rejection must learn how to live with being wanted.

The question extends to the way we see ourselves. “Wicker” opens with the Basketmaker’s narration and introduces the idea of how catching one’s reflection can alter the way a person understands their own life. 

I asked Colman what she sees when she looks in the mirror now. She recalls something her mother once said about aging. “I look in the mirror, and I only feel like I’m 18,” her mother told her. Colman remembers dismissing the idea when she was younger, only to discover that she understood it as she grew older. 

“I look in the mirror and go, ‘Oh, it’s changing. I don’t feel any different.’” There is pleasure, she says, in learning to accept those changes. “I’m really liking my gray hair. I sort of feel like I’ve earned it. It’s a bit of sparkle. I love it. I’m learning to like the changes.”

For Skarsgård, the question of appearance takes on a more literal dimension. The role required him to surrender his familiar face to an elaborate practical-effects creation, with prosthetics designed to make the texture and structure of woven material move with the actor.

The character’s appeal, however, depends on more than the spectacle of his appearance. Skarsgård plays him as a man newly introduced to the world, with an earnestness that makes his directness feel both funny and disarming. “When I first read the script, I found him to be incredibly pure and open and there was something very sweet and precious about that,” Skarsgård says in a previous interview. “He means exactly what he says, and there’s like an earnest quality to him.”

The film’s erotic charge emerged partly from the contrast between the character’s artificial construction and his unmistakably human appeal. The filmmakers initially approached the sexual encounters between the Fisherwoman and her husband as opportunities for comedy, with the physical mechanics of their marriage offering plenty of material. Then Skarsgård was cast, and the scenes turned out to be sexier than they planned.

Skarsgård’s willingness to embrace unique challenges reflects his approach to choosing projects. He looks for characters that excite him creatively, along with filmmakers and fellow actors whose company might make the work rewarding. “I want to have a great time. I wanna work with nice people who are talented,” he says. Before committing to a project with someone he does not know, he often calls around to people who have worked with them.

When asked whether universal praise might be preferable to criticism, Skarsgård offers another complication. “That also scares me, because then if you’re also already prone to narcissism, I go even more, and you start believing the hype,” he says with a laugh.