“Is this the best way to promote a film?” a reporter asked Alexander Skarsgård years ago at the 2023 Sundance premiere of Infinity Pool, an event to which the actor wore a tasteful crewneck sweater and a leashed leather dog collar.
“I have no idea,” the actor, whose icy good looks, 6’4” stature, and terse Scandinavian nature, always brings a certain freaky vibe to the function that keeps everybody on their toes, deadpanned in reply. He added, with a sly smile, “It’s a hot look.”
(The accessory was, in fact, thematic; there are leash-centric moments in the film, which was directed by the unnerving-by-blood director Brandon Cronenberg, son of David Cronenberg.)
Nonetheless, it’s a promotional strategy that Skarsgård continued to stick with at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival, which kicked off in southern France last week. This year, the Swedish actor is promoting the upcoming drama Pillion, in which his character, the leader of a queer biker gang, starts up a dom-sub relationship with a newcomer played by the British actor Harry Melling, who is most broadly recognizable for portraying Dudley Dursley in the Harry Potter films. (Per a recent interview with Vanity Fair, when Skarsgård first learned about this project, he “definitely wanted to put on the leather gear and jump into the trenches with it.”)
Working with the celebrity stylist Harry Lambert, whose client roster also includes Harry Styles and Emma Corrin, Skarsgård dressed strategically in a casual, kink-forward look for a Pillion screening: black leather pants and biker boots by Loewe, dark aviator shades from Linda Farrow, and an ’80s-era tee printed with an illustration of a supine man licking the sole of a leather boot. Later on, inside the theater—where the film received a seven-minute standing ovation—Skarsgård embraced a man in a pup hood, who revealed himself on Instagram to be a real-life Welsh biker named Paul Tallis, a consultant on the film.
After the leather pants and vintage bootlicker T-shirt, Skarsgård upped the ante for the red-carpet premiere of Wes Anderson’s latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, in a festishistic Saint Laurent look—a haughty double-breasted tuxedo jacket paired with thigh-high black leather boots— from designer Anthony Vacarello’s fall 2025 menswear collection, which imagined a fictional ’80s linkup between Yves Saint Laurent and the artist Robert Mapplethorpe. (Think boardroom by day, BDSM dungeon by night.)
