Your father did a lot of theatre when you were young. Did you see any of his plays?
I didn’t go to any plays at all. I wasn’t into him doing [Swedish playwright August] Strindberg and stuff. It wasn’t like growing up with a famous dad. He wasn’t working in the States a lot until he did Breaking The Waves when I was 19, then Good Will Hunting the following year. But he worked with [acclaimed Swedish director, writer and producer] Ingmar Bergman when I was a kid – I remember running around the theatre and this weird old man would be talking to my dad on stage. My favourite part was the hair and make-up room with all the prosthetics and crazy wigs. It was obviously a dream for a little kid to put that stuff on. There was one big, crazy nose that scared me a bit.

How often do you go back to Sweden?
A lot. I go four times a year – I was there for the whole of August. My family is all there – my mum is still in the apartment we grew up in and my dad and his wife live a block away. My siblings [Skarsgård has four brothers, two half-brothers and a sister] are all in a three-block radius.

Where in Stockholm would you recommend for Stylist readers?
Nytorget Square in Södermalm – it’s a little square overlooking the city. It’s the epicenter of south Stockholm where I grew up. It’s a great area for shopping, especially antiques and record stores. There are also lots of great bars and restaurants, including Nytorget 6. That’s a lovely afternoon, to have lunch there and wander around. A 15-minute walk away is Fyra Knop, a low-key creperie run by some friends of mine from Algeria and Morocco. They’re the loveliest people.

What was the biggest adjustment you had to make when you realised you’d become famous?
I quit – I stopped acting for eight years. I did a TV movie [The Dog That Smiled] when I was 13 which got some attention and it made me uncomfortable. People would recognise me but I just wanted to be normal. I think a lot of kids feel that way – you just want to blend in. I found my way back to acting when I was 21 after I finished in the military [Sweden had mandatory military service until 2010] and didn’t know what else to do. The reason I quit had nothing to do with the work, it was everything around it. So I thought, maybe I should give it a go and see how I feel as an adult. I didn’t want to wake up when I was 55 and think, ‘Ahh sh*t, I should have tried that’. So I went to New York to theatre school to check it out.

Playing it cool: Alexander Skarsgård talks politics, homebrew and turning his hand to comedy