‘He Had To Be Funny To Survive’: Stellan Skarsgård on Robin Williams

Stellan Skarsgård is talking about his experience working with Robin Williams on Good Will Hunting. He opened up about the late actor’s behavior on the sets of the critically acclaimed 1997 drama film.

Stellan Skarsgård talks about Robin Williams

During a Q&A after the screening of Good Will Hunting on Friday, Stellan Skarsgård recalled Robin Williams’s behavior (via Entertainment Weekly). Skarsgård stated, “As a person, when you were alone with him, he was calm, and he was nice, and he was lovely, and he could talk about anything.”

However, he noticed that Williams seemed to change when more people arrived. Skarsgård said, “But then when a couple more people came to him, he suddenly would get up — to save himself, in a way.” The Golden Globe Award winner added, “And I think it’s a thing he had from school. He had to be funny to survive.”

Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant recalled how Williams wanted more takes for almost every scene. The filmmaker shared, “Robin was the one that was like, ‘One more, one more, one more.” He continued, “So we did 10 [takes] sometimes as opposed to maybe three, because he wanted to do a fast one, a slow one, a happy one, a sad one, a funny one, a not-funny one.”

Skarsgård also acknowledged William’s intense dedication to the film for which the latter won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. “It was fantastic because, as you said, he wanted to do new takes.” He explained, “And he also had a thing that was kind of a necessity for him because… he’d get an idea about a joke, for instance, and he had to produce it and get it out of the body.” Skarsgård added, “He couldn’t live with it inside. And I felt all the time that he had three parallel brains working, and very fast!”

The 74-year-old continued, “The good thing was that he did different takes and they were really different. Some were very dark, and some were very funny. And all the other actors, we were hanging in there.” He noted, “We were playing different kinds of scenes with him.”

Source: Comingsoon.net