PHOTO: Bildbyrån + TT Nyhetsbyrån
Getting the honor of playing Börje Salming wasn’t just fun for Valter Skarsgård.
The actor also got to experience many new things during the filming.
– It was the most difficult for me, Skarsgård tells Sportbibeln.
The series about Börje Salming, “Börje – The Journey of a Legend”, has been widely praised after the first episode was released two weeks ago. The series has been in the making for several years – the director Amir Chamdin and Börje Salming had contact for a long time.
Skarsgård’s anxiety
Walter Skarsgårdwho plays Börje Salming in the series, entered the picture just over two years ago.
Since Börje was a great hockey player, there are of course hockey scenes in the series. For Skarsgård, it was not always easy to implement them.
– I think hockey was the toughest. Just because I couldn’t skate from the beginning, so it was a very long process to learn it. And then the emotional stress every day of filming when you had to play hockey with a lot of talented hockey players, and you just like “okay, you just have to make it work”, says Skarsgård to Sportbibeln.
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Playing hockey became challenging both physically and mentally.
– Performance anxiety is something I’m not used to that becomes scary in a different way. There is an achievement in acting, but I’m comfortable with it, this was doing something every day that you can’t really do. It was hard to balance it mentally. And physically! It’s also very stressful – 12 hours in old 70s grills like that. Now I’ve learned, but I’m still a newcomer to it, says Skarsgård.
Behind the hockey scenes
You had no experience at all of hockey before?
– I couldn’t stand on skates. In the store, I was about to fall just when I tried the skates for the first time. I couldn’t tie skates at all, I didn’t know anything.
READ MORE: Stig Salming’s only hope for the TV series about Börje is the best thing we’ve heard: “He wasn’t just a hockey player”
But it is not only Valter who portrays Börje when it comes to skating.
– It’s me and a guy named Niklas Sandström who do it together. He’s my body double, like, to do the more advanced stuff that I can’t do. It was often very big choreographers so it was very advanced, says Skarsgård.
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He continues:
– We had great choreographers from the USA, who came and painted entire match sequences. Often real matches, but also sometimes things we made up. Then Niklas did the whole thing x number of times, and he did it quickly and coolly. And then I did exactly the same thing, so they can pick and choose a bit. “It didn’t look good there when Valter swerved”, then you can have Niklas swing, or “there we need to get it a little more like that”, then you can just choose angles. Together we portrayed Börje.
READ MORE: Valter Skarsgård’s heartwarming memory of Börje Salming during the filming of the TV series: “He laughed out loud”
Hardest challenge
Although hockey was tough, it wasn’t the hardest thing for Skarsgård. The hardest part was during the two years he was preparing for the role.
– I trained for two years. So it was two years of hockey training, two years of gym, two years of diet. And in that, it was also a preparation for the character. Because my hockey coaches knew who Börje was, of course. My PT had trained Börje, so he also knew what Börje was like. So I got really drilled in what was hardest for me, which was finding this frontal bone and fighting through the pain.
It was mainly during the time in the gym that Skarsgård had to learn it.
– To push yourself to the limit, and then understand that you must not have limits, and keep pushing, and keep going, and sort of sit and cry in the gym because you went too hard. And then push even more, throw up and cry and… That was a big part of it. Then I knew what it was like to have that forehead bone, which made acting on the ice much easier. I stepped out there and decided “okay, now I’m switching this mindset that I’ve had to do for two years now. And then we war.
– But the personal part with Börje was easier for me, because he was a very kind and soft person, which is a bit more like I am in private. So it was a little easier to take in that part, the thing I needed to learn the most was this sports person.
READ MORE: The giant miss in the acclaimed TV series about Börje Salming – Hedda Stiernstedt now reveals the truth about ex-wife Margitta
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