All Alexander Skarsgård needs to get ready for the biggest high-fashion event of the year is a raw bar and a heap of cashmere.

“I’m having oysters,” he told Vanity Fair shortly before he attended the Met Gala 2023 to celebrate the opening of the Costume Institute’s new exhibit, “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty.” “That’s my process, that’s the only thing I need. I need a dozen oysters and then I’m ready to roll, ready to rumble.”He also, of course, needed the outfit: a black tuxedo that he described as “very classic Thom Browne.”

“It’s quite tight, quite short, and nice big leather boots and then a cashmere white vest that I’m very fond of,” he said. “I love it very much. It’s very beautiful.”

Skarsgård wears “pretty much the same clothes every day, and it’s not very creative or exciting,” by his own account, so you may not think he’d be terribly enthused to get all done up for the gala. You’d be wrong.

“It’s important to feel that you’re excited about what you’re wearing and that you feel comfortable in it and that you feel like more than a mannequin, that you’ve been part of choosing the whole look,” he said, calling it “a nice juxtaposition” to his day-to-day looks.

“I’m not wearing white gloves, but maybe I should,” he added with a laugh.

He’s similarly involved and passionate about what he wears onscreen in Succession, where the wealth is more stealth (no ludicrously capacious bags here) and he plays businessman Lukas Matsson, who is sometimes a foe to the Roy family, sometimes a friend, and always very enigmatic and Swedish. While he couldn’t reveal upcoming plot points, like what the fallout from Matsson’s Holocaust joke tweet from Sunday’s episode might look like, Skarsgård could and did discuss how Matsson ended up walking barefoot across the tarmac in the most recent episode. In short, Skarsgård can’t be blamed for falling for a luxuriously textured carpet. Who wouldn’t lose the shoes, really.

“It wasn’t really planned,” he said. “I often wear slides when I show up to set and when we rehearse and I was wearing slides and the private jet we were shooting in a very, very comfortable carpet. So I took my slides off and was walking around barefoot. And then I thought that that could be quite fun if Matsson—because it makes sense that he takes his shoes off on the plane, but that he doesn’t bother putting his shoes or anything on when he walks over to [Shiv’s] [Sarah Snook] plane. There was something about the geography and the way the planes stood. There were parked like 50 yards from each other and they’re gonna do a wide shot of Matsson walking and I thought it’d be visually quite interesting maybe if he just casually walked out without shoes on.”

Throughout his run on the show, Skarsgård has sometimes worn his own items as Matsson, like the super-casual ensemble he wore when Logan (Brian Cox) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) ditched the family’s pre-wedding festivities and scrambled to his house in Lake Como, where he surprised them by suggesting that GoJo acquire Royco, instead of the other way around.

“When I came to base camp that morning, I was wearing just slides and a pair of kind of very casual pants and a gray T-shirt like a super-worn, like $50 T-shirt, if that—it might have been like a $20 T-shirt, but it definitely wasn’t like a fancy brand,” Skarsgård said. He talked to costume designer Jonathan Schwartz about his idea to wear his own duds. “The Roys are always so immaculately tailored, dresses, tuxedos, or suits, all the knitted sweaters—everything’s like incredibly expensive and it looks expensive and just radiates money. I thought it’d be a nice power move in a way if Matsson is the kind of diametrically opposed to that, super casual.”

“The theme for his wardrobe was kind of casual peacocking, so the term will be cas-cock,” he said. “Lukas Matsson is very cas-cock.”

Whether Matsson manages to get canceled over his now deleted tweet, or the Roy siblings throw the deal through backstage machinations and stock manipulation, we’re guaranteed to see more horn-locking and puzzlingly fashionable shenanigans from Matsson.

“I’ve been dreaming with Matsson as a contrast to the Roys, visually the contrast, and in that it’s very, it’s a combination of very casual, but also, you’ll see in some later episodes, it’s quite a lot of peacocking as well,” Skarsgård said. “When you first see him, it might look like it’s like laundry day and he wears sweatpants, but then when you look closer, it’s actually like he’s wearing some ugly Crocs, but they are designer, limited-edition from Japan, $20,000 Crocs, and his worn, old T-shirt is actually made of hair of infant babies, humans. The most weird, eclectic stuff.”

INTERVIEW VANITY FAIR BY KASE WICKMAN
PHOTOS BY RYAN LOWRY.