Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Best portrayal of a real life hero: Alexander Skarsgard as Brad Colbert on Generation Kill

David Simon, the writer-producer behind The Wire, explains how a 6-foot-5 Swede brought his Iraq war miniseries, Generation Kill, alive.



Honestly, I wasn’t sure that Alexander Skarsgard was the right man to play Brad Colbert in Generation Kill. I saw some of what director Susanna White saw in the early reads: a wry smile, a stoicism, a warrior rage carefully contained and muted. But I was worried about the Swedish accent, which was, at that point, too thick and certain to be looped. And Alex was too tall. The real Colbert was average size, skinny even. He led by character and example, not with physical presence.

But then Skarsgard went to work. Read by read he discovered the Recon marine sergeant we required. He shaved the accent. He buried more and more emotion. He embraced all of that brutal military nomenclature, one phrase at a time. In short, Susanna was dead right.

A year later the real Brad Colbert rode his motorcycle up from Pendleton to the Warner lot to see what Hollywood had done with his life. He watched as our make-believe Colbert berated our make-believe Ray Person as they invaded our make-believe Iraq. Colbert barely smiled.

“Not bad being played by a blond 6-foot-5 Swede,” I offered.

“I’ll live with it,” Colbert said, dry as dirt — a line read that Alex would have nailed.

This article originally appeared in the December 2008 issue of Men’s Journal.
http://www.mensjournal.com/

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