Bill Skarsgård knows that there are “definitely political parallels” to Dead Man’s Wire. The new Gus Van Sant movie chronicles the true-life story of Tony Kiritsis, a man who made headlines in 1977 after taking a mortgage company employee hostage: “The little guy against the man and the system, you know?” he tells Consequence. “There are a lot of traps that you can fall into where you feel like, ‘this sort of American dream was sold to me, but it was fake.’ There’s a whole system here that’s rigged to people staying in the classes that they’re born into.”
In the film, Tony has wired a shotgun to the back of a man’s neck because he feels like he’s being screwed by the execs at the company — while he doesn’t want to hurt anyone, he’s hoping that the media attention he receives as a result of his actions will help him get the justice he craves. The sort of little-guy-versus-the-machine narrative that Dead Man’s Wire depicts is one the creative team knew had relevance to today; production began on the movie a month after a young man named Luigi Mangione made global headlines for killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
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“That case is very different, but there are a lot of parallels to the seventies and today — this feeling of loss of trust and faith in the government and in institutions,” Skarsgård says. Not to mention these “economically troubling times, and this populist revolt that’s going on. This story could have easily happened today. I don’t think it’s a good thing that those parallels are there, but they are, and the problems are real.”
Continues Skarsgård, “I don’t think that this movie is trying to make a political statement. I don’t think great movies try to make statements in that way, really. But this is a comment on society, that’s for sure. Ostracized people, people who feel like a system is rigged against them, sometimes do violent things.”
When Van Sant originally offered Skarsgård the role of Tony, he hesitated. Well, first he was flattered “to even be on the radar of one of our great filmmakers.” Then, he read the script, and while Skarsgård thought it was great, writer Austin Kolodney had included numerous links to recordings and footage of the real-life Tony — who does not share much of a physical resemblance with the Nosferatu and It star.
Getting past that issue, and finding his way to playing the character, was “a journey I had to go through. The real Tony was my central focus in the early stages of the prepping, and then once we showed up on set, the created Tony that’s in the film, he started dictating the action. It was a great complex, complicated, fun character and a great filmmaker.”
Skarsgård says that there were a lot of factors in the ’70s setting that “spoke to me” — especially the way the movie reflects classic films of the era: “Like Network or Dog Day Afternoon or Fail Safe… Any Sidney Lumet movie, really.”
But as for the modern-day parallels, Skarsgård observes that “the media cycle is just changing so rapidly that every single week there’s a new sort of doomsday narrative.” Which is perhaps why it feels like it’s been much longer than 13 months since the Luigi Mangione incident occurred. “I remember there was a discourse when that happened of like, okay, now civil war is around — people predicted that everybody would go after mortgage brokers or health insurance companies or whatever it is. And that didn’t happen,” he says.
While CEOs haven’t been hunted in the streets, Skarsgård does note that political assassinations, like the death of Charlie Kirk, are still happening. “We’re not through it, whatever we’re going through,” he says. “I think it’s getting increasingly harder to predict where it’s going. It feels like it’s changing a lot.”
Skarsgård does feel that Dead Man’s Wire, as a story, “works without the political connotations to it. It is a thrilling spectacle in its own right.” And he’s interested in whether filmgoers might end up debating who’s ultimately in the right after seeing the movie: “People getting into an argument like, ‘I think I’m with Tony,’ and someone saying ‘How dare you?’ Maybe there’s an argument to be had afterwards, and people will learn something or discover something in that. That’d be good.”
For as Skarsgård notes, “we all love the story of the self-made poor man or poor woman, of course they’re inspiring.” However, he comes from Sweden, “which is a country that has much more equal opportunity for all of its citizens, where you get a lot of second and third and fourth chances.”
He chuckles. “I’m on a rant… I certainly don’t have all the answers. But where we are in the world… It certainly could be improved, is what I’m saying.”
Dead Man’s Wire is in theaters now.
