Why you’ll never want to challenge rising star Gustav Lindh to a game of movie trivia

Gustav Lindh strolls through the double doors of Stockholm’s Victoria Cinema and removes his Matrix-style shades. Perched at a table on the upstairs mezzanine, I am looking down at a movie star. He smiles and walks towards me. “I’m Gustav,” he says, hand outstretched, unaware that I have been researching him incessantly for the past several days.

“This is my area. This is my cinema,” he says as he sips his americano. It is a symbolic meeting place; though Lindh has walked red carpets next to Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman and Ethan Hawke and worked with some of the industry’s top directors, at his heart he is a movie buff whose greatest love is the craft of acting itself.

“I went to this theatre a few weeks ago when I watched The Lost Daughter,” he says, referring to the Maggie Gyllenhaal-helmed film based on the Elena Ferrante novel of the same name. “And just watching Jessie Buckley and Olivia Colman’s faces for two hours, and being so immersed in that and then also going to see The Batman in the same theatre. That's what's so beautiful about what we do. We get to ask questions and get people to think but we also allow them to get their popcorn and have some fun.”

When we meet, the 26-year-old is in the midst of a publicity circuit for The Northman, the Robert Egger-directed Viking epic that Lindh describes as a “cinematic gut punch.” The film retells the classic Scandinavian legend Amleth, which inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There are naked fight scenes, an all-star cast, volcanoes, supernatural visions and Björk – not bad for Lindh’s first English-speaking film.

Lindh plays Thorir the Proud, a naturalistic version of a Disney villain – “we went for the stoic viking while adding just a little bit of a mean girls energy” – who also lacks the “physicality” of a viking. It’s a stark contrast to Alexander Skarsgård, whose abs deserve their own acting credit. While Lindh didn’t have to put on muscle mass, he did undergo a “shocking” transformation via hair extensions and a fake beard. “The moustache is mine though,” he adds. He also learned how to wield a sword. “I worked with a sword master. I spent a week and a half with him learning how to get the Viking form,” he says, brandishing his phone to show some clips.

The actor first saw the film under noteworthy circumstances. In November of last year, Skarsgård called up Lindh and asked if he was free. “He called me up all of a sudden and was like, 'You want to go see the film?' And I was like 'What? Yes, please.' So him, me and his dad, Stellan, went to Universal's office,” Lindh recalls. “It was triple password protected.”

Given the intensity of the shooting process – due to Covid, he and the rest of the cast were isolated for months – Lindh found it a bit overwhelming to watch. “I had sort of a hard time processing it, wondering how I felt about it,” he says. But at the world premiere in Stockholm, surrounded by friends and a packed cinema, he was “blown away.” The afterparty was held at the Viking Museum.

The notion of acting being a dream come true is something that comes up frequently during our chat. He is humbled by the opportunity to do what he loves everyday. Growing up in Västerås, a small town an hour outside of Stockholm, he played football and tennis competitively, but always harboured a desire to act.

“I just fell in love with movies,” he says, citing The Godfather trilogy as a big influence. “I think I was 15 or something and movies like Thomas Vinterberg’s film The Hunt with Mads Mikkelsen, Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine with Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling, and then Bullhead with Matthias Schoenaerts came out and just amped it up for me in terms getting obsessed with arthouse cinema.” It’s noteworthy that he mentions not only his favourite films but their stars as well – one can imagine a teenaged Lindh devouring these performances, projecting himself onto the screen.

He applied for acting school in Malmö and landed some small roles in local productions as he studied. The past couple of years have been a blur of work in both Sweden and Denmark. His credits consist of meaty, complex roles. Queen of Hearts saw his underage character enter an affair with his father’s wife. Gustav Möller’s The Dark Heart, which Lindh tells me I “have to watch”, is a TV thriller centred around forbidden love and a tragic murder.

Meanwhile, his performance as Aron in hit Swedish TV show Älska mig (Love Me) proves he can carry a rom-com with aplomb. If you’re looking for insight into the “real” Lindh, he says Aron is probably the closest thing. “That character is, like, just my own voice... and there was a lot of improvisation so I can pull jokes that I might do in real life,” he says.

Thrillers and drama, however, do seem to follow him. His next role is Raskolnikov from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, performed at The Royal Dramatic Theatre in Sweden. “I don't know how they find me, these dark complex young men. I guess it has something to do with the way that I look,” he says, noting that he’s a “very happy and uncomplicated person in real life.”

Lindh’s thirst to know everything – literally, everything – about cinema, television and theatre is fascinating. He rattles off movie names and directors easily and can quote movies at the drop of a hat. His spare time is spent listening to podcasts on directing techniques. He counts Heath Ledger and Philip Seymour Hoffman among his heroes. He tells me how he hopes to continue doing theatre throughout his career, just like Hoffman and Al Pacino. “Theatre is like the gym for actors,” he explains. For his 25th birthday, one of Lindh’s friends gifted him a board game based on movie trivia. “We tried it one night and I just nailed every single question and like halfway through, they were like, 'F*** this',” he laughs before adding, “I have a nerd quality.”

In his short career, he has won awards, had a film at Sundance. He’s been touted as a ‘star on the rise’ and ‘Sweden’s next big thing’. But what does success mean for him? When is he no longer on the rise, and simply just a star? To answer he, of course, quotes the actor Oscar Isaac. “I'm paraphrasing,” he starts. “But he said something like, ‘I remember thinking if they could just give me one shot. I knew that I could do it. I knew that I could be this huge movie star. And then I got that shot. And I did the film and it came and it went. And I was like, if they just gave me one more shot.’ And then he got the shot again and again, and then he realised that it's not about that. It's about the work we do as actors.”

This leads us to the topic of movie stars. He argues that movie stars in the old Hollywood sense don’t really exist anymore. The advent of screening services and the rise of feature-film quality TV has changed the climate. “The Last Duel. I went and saw it in theatres this autumn. It stars Matt Damon, Jodie Comer, Ben Affleck and Adam Driver, and it was directed by Ridley Scott,” he says. “I don't know a single person who saw the film in the cinema. What does that mean for movie stars? I mean, 20 years ago, if Tom Cruise did a film it’d be like, let's all go and see the Tom Cruise film. The cinematic experience just has a different status in society now.”

Lindh seems to fit into a new crop of leading men – think Timothée Chalamet, Harry Styles, Tom Holland – who go against the archetypal actor. The next gen of male stars are talented as hell with an awkward sweetness and know their way around a Hedi Slimane pantsuit. They aren’t afraid of, as Lindh puts it, “being vulnerable”. “I tried to watch the first couple of episodes of Sex and the City [the original one] – and the men are so not sexy in the way that they behave,” he says. “Now we fall in love with the likes of the sexy priest in Fleabag and Adam Sackler in Girls. Men and women being vulnerable. We want to see that people experience things and are open.”

Fashion and film often go hand in hand, so it was only a matter of time before the houses came knocking. Louis Vuitton spring/ summer 2020 saw Lindh and his cut-gem cheekbones get their first gig. “I had been street cast four or five times in my teens, but I’ve turned them down to focus on my acting,” he says. But when Vuitton called, he jumped at the chance.

An admirer of fashion and pop-culture, he admits he often finds himself in luxury boutiques, scouting for inspiration. “Then I go to a vintage store and find something similar, super cheap,” he says. He takes me through his outfit: a vintage checked shirt, vintage light washed jeans, which set him back a mere 100 kroner, and on his feet, New Balance trainers. Like his career, his approach to shopping is very considered, “I never go into a vintage store without having a purpose,” he says.

For someone so driven, fame is an interesting beast for him to tackle. Being an A-list actor and being famous are inextricable, yet it seems Lindh hasn’t quite wrapped his head around the celebrity part of the equation. “I don't go to a lot of events, so I just stick to my friends and I keep a very low profile,” he says. He cites actors like Skarsgård, Zendaya, Florence Pugh and our cover star, Alicia Vikander, as “paving the way and doing it very gracefully.” “My life outside my work is just like everyone else’s. I do my laundry. I play tennis with my friends. I read books, and focus on the next gig,” he says. “And yeah, every once in a while, I get shitfaced with my friends.”