Alexander Skarsgård Played a Gay Biker Dom in February. In October He's a Wicker Husband.

The first trailer for Wicker arrived on July 30, and the setup is this: Olivia Colman plays a fisherwoman on the outskirts of a seaside village — “smelly, single and perpetually ridiculed,” in Rotten Tomatoes' synopsis — who tires of being told there is no shame in living out her remaining days alone, and commissions a husband from the local basket weaver. The basket weaver is Peter Dinklage. The husband is Alexander Skarsgård, in a practical suit built by Joe Dunckley and Wētā Workshop.

The tagline is “a hard man is good to find.”

One villager, in the trailer Deadline posted, tells another: “I heard that he's strong as a tree and just as hard.” Colman's fisherwoman, on married life: “He has his days. I have mine,” she says, and then: “And we have our nights.” The A.V. Club ran its write-up under the line that Skarsgård is “a sexy new kind of Wicker man.”

What it actually is

Wicker is a romantic fantasy comedy written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, adapted from Ursula Wills-Jones's short story “The Wicker Husband.” Elizabeth Debicki plays the judgmental neighbor, Richard E. Grant an incompetent village doctor. Lol Crawley, who shot The Brutalist, is on camera; Anna Meredith wrote the score. Per its Wikipedia entry, Dev Patel was attached before Skarsgård.

It premiered at Sundance in January, and Black Bear took North American rights the following month, at the European Film Market. It runs 105 minutes, opens in limited U.S. release on October 23 and widens on October 30, which is also its U.K. date.

On Rotten Tomatoes it sits at 91% — off 22 counted reviews, with no audience score recorded yet. Speaking to Deadline at Park City, Colman said: “I think it's in my top three favorite scripts I've ever read.”

Why his name registers here

The reason his name registers here at all is Pillion.

In it — Harry Lighton's first feature, adapted from Adam Mars-Jones's novel Box Hill — Skarsgård plays Ray, a biker who takes Harry Melling's timid Colin into a dom-sub relationship. PinkNews described him as a “leather-clad biker daddy” opposite a “meek traffic warden and barbershop-quartet fan,” and clocked Jake Shears in the biker crew. Asked how he landed a man like that, Colin answers: “I have an aptitude for devotion.”

It was not a discreet release. Gay leather clubs were invited to its premieres, SLM Stockholm and Leathermen of Ireland among them. Lighton wanted an NC-17 in the U.S. and the film went out Not Rated instead; the BBFC and Ireland's IFCO each gave it an 18 for sex and nudity.

And it cleaned up. Pillion premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, where it took the section's Best Screenplay award — and, separately, the Palm Dog's Mutt Moment prize. At the British Independent Film Awards it drew ten nominations and won four, Best British Independent Film among them. Made for £814,000 — roughly a million dollars — it has grossed $6.6 million, per the Box Office Mojo tally cited on its Wikipedia entry.

A24 put Pillion in U.S. theaters on February 6. Wicker lands October 23. Same year, same country, two extremely different men.

The honest part

Wicker is not a gay film. Colman's fisherwoman marries a man made of wicker; there is no gay storyline in anything released so far, and we are not going to invent one.

Here is our read, and it is ours rather than anyone's reporting: what carries over from Pillion is not subject matter, it is register. A tagline that lands, to our ear, as a flip of a Flannery O'Connor title. A leading man cast, again, as the thing other people want. A village scandalized by a woman enjoying herself, and Elizabeth Debicki in high dudgeon about it.

That is a camp inheritance — and it is why we are writing up a film with no gay storyline in it.