It may shock you to learn that Alexander Skarsgård, star of True Blood and Infinity Pool and who’s been walked along a red carpet on a dog leash, can’t abide boring. “I’m terrified of run-of-the-mill stuff,” he explains. “Middle-of-the-road stuff. Normcore stuff. Generic characters make me nervous. They make me insecure.” But a sub-dom romcom about a smoldering, well-endowed biker and the tiny barbershop quartet singer who loves him? Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes! “It’s pure joy,” Skarsgård continues. “It’s funny, sweet, tender and awkward. With just the perfect amount of penis.”
Alrighty then. The film is called Pillion, and stars Harry Melling as Colin, whose isolated existence in a small English village is upended by the arrival of Skarsgård’s Ray, who likes leather and silence, and for his lovers to be of an eternally devoted bent. Harry Lighton, the first-time director behind the movie, wanted Pillion to walk a tonal tightrope of outrageous sex and quaint banality. “I haven’t necessarily seen many films that include the very transgressive elements of life sitting neatly side-by-side with things that are sweet,” he says. “But the idea that you can leave an orgy to go and have a Sunday roast with your parents is, to me, very real.”
