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This is fresh air. I'm Dave Davies. Our guest today, Swedish actor Stellan Scarsgaard, has had a long and interesting

career, which only seems to get more interesting with age. Now in his 70s, he's just earned a

Golden Globe Award and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance in the

widely acclaimed film Sentimental Value from the Danish Norwegian director

Joachim Trier. This surge in Scarsgaard's fortunes comes four years after he suffered a stroke,

which left him struggling to memorize his lines. He found a workaround, which we'll talk about,

and that enabled him to continue to play roles he'd begun in the science

fiction movie series Dune and the Star Wars spinoff TV series Andor, as well as the film

sentimental value.

Scarsgard began acting as a teenager and has appeared in more than a hundred movies, from

independent European films like Breaking the Waves and Melancholia, to commercial

Hollywood fair, such as the hunt for Red October, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Mamma Mia.

He's also found time to raise eight children from two marriages. Five of those kids are also

professional actors. The best known in the United States are his sons, Alexander, and Bill.

Scarsgaard will find out if he's an Oscar winner at the award ceremony March 15th. He spoke to me

last week from a studio in London. Stellan Scardscard, welcome to fresh air. Thank you very much.

In this film, Sentimental Value, you play Gustav Borg.

He's a famous director.

And it's about his family relationships.

He's the target of a lot of anger from one of his daughters because she says he wasn't

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