Alexander Skarsgård plays prestige TV’s most handsome monsters

DURING THE FIFTH episode of Succession season four, Lukas Matsson has a confession to make. At his company retreat in Norway, the tech billionaire slips off to his cabin with Shiv Roy, who he’s only just met, and opens up about a failed affair with an employee. The problem, you see, is that he sent the employee some of his blood. As a joke, really, but one of those jokes that isn’t a joke. OK, maybe it was a lot of his blood.

This is obviously disturbing behaviour for anyone, let alone the man who’s trying to buy the entire Waystar Royco corporation. Still, when asked about the meeting the following day, Shiv’s immediate answer is that Matsson is very “conventionally attractive.” She’s mostly trying to torture her estranged husband Tom, but the line is believable because Matsson is played by Alexander Skarsgård, the best handsome villain HBO has ever hired.

The mid-aughts may have been dominated by sexy teen vampire Edward Cullen, but if you were a little bit older, or gayer, or just more into prestige television, you probably spent that era obsessed with a different undead guy: True Blood’s Eric Northman, also played by Skarsgård. When Matsson started talking about mailing an ex-lover his frozen platelets, I imagined former True Blood fans around the country sitting up a little straighter. Was this…fan service?

A thousand-year-old hottie in a barely-buttoned shirt, Eric Northman was obnoxious but sexy in the time-honoured style of dashing dukes and wisecracking pirates and other romance novel heels. But in the years since, Skarsgård has found his sweet spot in roles where he can use his Viking Ken doll looks to move the plot forward in ways that have nothing to do with being likeable.

In Big Little Lies, he was terrifying as an abusive husband, a character who needs to be truly detestable for the story to work. In a cameo in Atlanta, he plays Zazie Beetz’s unhinged European boyfriend. And in the underrated 2015 film The Diary of a Teenage Girl, he pulls off the rare trick of being both story-drivingly-handsome and totally pathetic, playing an adult man who’s sleeping with his girlfriend’s teen daughter. He’s got those puppy-dog eyes, but aren’t they a little flat, a little dead inside? You fully sympathize with why the young protagonist falls for him, even if you also understand that he’s a walking red flag.

In Succession, Matsson is hardly a romantic figure. Watching him cozy up to the pregnant Shiv made me as nervous as watching her play with the little vial of cocaine he handed her. Still, the character is embodied in a way that seems designed to stress out everyone around him. There’s a little moment in last night’s episode when Matsson takes off his jacket, revealing a glimpse of his abs and hip flexors. Intentional or not, it seemed designed to intimidate Kendall and Roman (maybe especially Roman, who Kieran Culkin plays as deeply uncomfortable in his own skin). Matsson also keeps insisting that they meet him on top of a mountain, a place where he seems entirely at home and the two city-boy Roys seem lost. (Adrien Brody’s character Josh Aaronson did something similar in season 3; the Roys do not function well in nature). And when Shiv is trying to needle Tom, she describes Matsson as “broad,” adding, devastatingly, “I used to think you were broad.”

In the macho world of Waystar Royco, where masculinity is currency — not to mention whiteness — Matsson can outspend everyone simply by dint of looking like Thor. His blond handsomeness is particularly destabilising both because it plays into uneasy assumptions about race and power, and because, for better or for worse, we’re all more likely to trust good-looking people. In a show where nearly everyone is toxic to some degree, he’s especially dangerous because his hotness (and how blithe he is about his hotness, which only makes him seem more hotter) causes those around him to lower their guard.

In HBO’s behind-the-scenes clip after the episode, Jeremy Strong talks about how Lukas Matsson fills the power vacuum left by Logan in the kids’ lives, adding that in the same way, Skarsgård fills the power vacuum left by Brian Cox. Skarsgård actually was almost cast as Thor in the Marvel movies, but at this point it’s hard to imagine him playing an action hero. He’s got the looks, but in the end, he’s capable of doing something more complicated, more sinister, and, ultimately, much more interesting.

This article originally appeared on Harper’s BAZAAR US.