Those traps didn't come from nowhere. Alexander Skarsgård, lead of Robert Eggers' epic period revenge drama The Northman, had to put in work for that hulking physique — a stark transformation even from a recent project like season three of Succession, in which he is hot, but not Hunk Hot.
Enter Magnus Lygdbäck, trainer for the stars, who had previously worked with Skarsgård when he needed the body of a gorilla-raised jungle-swinger for The Legend of Tarzan. “This has been a passion project of his for over five years,” Lygdbäck tells GQ over Zoom. “I knew I was going to get this call one day.”
“You know, working with Alex is just — you know what you're getting. You get someone who's talented, hard working, and has the genetics. I mean, we saw that on Tarzan as well. He responds to training and nutrition in the best way possible. So I knew that we could do something great. We wanted a thicker, bigger, more intimidating look, this time around. He's a wolf bear.”
Here, Lygdbäck runs GQ through Skarsgård's training regime, from his relatively generous diet — three cheat meals over four days! A glass of wine a night! — to his gruelling five-days-a-week gym schedule while shooting.
On set
"I like to be hands on. I don't think you can get to that level unless you're there all the time.
"I make sure that the right food comes out at the right time. I create the menus with the chefs. I make sure that I'm in the trailer with the chef — you know, I nerd out. You have to be very precise. I'm also the one warming him up before big scenes, you know — if he's got a big physical day, or I have to pump him up between takes.
"We were in the gym five days a week [while filming]. Never more than an hour. Once you get close to where you want, you can even cut them down to four or five minutes. There were days where, you know, we showed up to the gym and we just walked out. I could tell when he didn't have it in him when he needed a day off.
"[One big challenge of filming] is you have to to build a character, to make someone move and feel like they are that character — while putting on maximum amounts of muscle mass as leanly as possible, and then staying that way. It is hard to film for five months. And keeping all that muscle mass on, keeping the body fat that low.
Cardio
“Alex is not a gym rat. He's a guy who likes to drink beer, or have a burger. [But] he loves to run. He's out doing up to 10k, sometimes, which is the best scenario possible for someone like me — I know I have someone who's mentally strong, who can run 10K, and he's got great ability to take up oxygen, and he has that long distance runner's body. But this time, I said: no more running. Just gym.
"I always start with cardio before every session, but we didn't do more than five to ten minutes before every session. Normally, I like to do high intensity interval training with all my clients, before all of my projects. We didn't do that so much this time, because I wanted him to grow as much as possible in size. So five to ten minutes of, you know, running, rowing or doing sprints on the treadmill. But that was it.
Diet
"Well, he ate everything, believe it or not. This time, actually, he was allowed to have a glass of wine on the weekends, as well. Not five, but…
"We were able to stick to my philosophy, which which I try to teach to everyone: if you eat five times per day, you need to make sure that 17 out of 20 meals are on point.
"Three out of twenty you can kind of enjoy life, eat whatever you want no food restrictions. So five meals per day, that means four day cycles, twenty meals in four days. In those four days, you can enjoy life three times. So we follow that very much. But that also means that those 17 meals that were on point, were really on point.
"Protein sources were anything from lean beef to chicken, or fish. We had a lot of fish. Vegetables, slow carbs, like whole grain-y stuff. Brown rice, potatoes.
The traps
"Alex is 45-years-old, he is very physical. And this movie, he's gonna swing an axe around. So it was a lot of shoulder prep, making sure that he stayed injured free.
“I'm standing next to the director, watching the monitor, making sure that — if it's a close up of his back, for example — I need to make sure that he carries himself, so that he looks the part.
…and everywhere else
“We did a lot of banded work for hips and shoulders, to build stability, flexibility and mobility. And then some free weights; we did the heavy lifts like, you know, deadlifts and squats, bench press. We did some more isolated exercises also, a bunch of different strength modalities.”
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