Alexander Skarsgård Finds A Dream Role In AMC's "The Little Drummer Girl"

Alexander Skarsgård Finds A Dream Role In AMC's "The Little Drummer Girl"

By Kellie Freeze

John le Carré’s 1983 spy novel The Little Drummer Girl comes to AMC beginning on Monday (Nov. 19) as a six-part miniseries event certain to satiate the action genre’s hungriest fans. The story unfolds over three consecutive nights and follows Charlie — a young British actress on vacation in Greece (played  by Florence Pugh) — as she meets and is wooed by Becker, a beguiling man who turns out to be a cunning Israeli spy (Alexander Skarsgård). Becker recruits the firebrand to act as bait in an international espionage plot to ensnare a foreign terrorist.

Simon Cornwell, one of le Carré’s sons and a producer of the project, explains that The Little Drummer Girl is far more than a period spy tale. “I think it’s a very powerful book, it’s a very layered piece of storytelling, and I’d like to think it does transcend its genre."

Skarsgård reveals that his education into the world of le Carré started young. His father Stellan read The Spy Who Came in From the Cold as a teen and has been a lifelong fan of the writer. “Even to this day, when Dad talks about le Carré, his face lights up, and he gets super excited,” the younger Skarsgård shares. He also says that when Stellan starred in the 2016 adaptation of le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor, he got to meet the legendary author. “It’s very sweet to see Dad talk about that experience. He’s like, ‘It was SO incredible!’”

When Skarsgård read the scripts for The Little Drummer Girl, he found them utterly irresistible. “Suddenly it was 3 in the morning!” he laughs. “So, I was very tired that day, but I just found it was such an incredible script and a very interesting story. I was fascinated by the characters, so I couldn’t put it down.”

The actor loves the delicious complexity of the story and says “there are definitely some action sequences, big set pieces, but a lot of it — like most of John Le Carre’s novels — is on a more cerebral level.” And the lure of playing a role within a role within a role — a Mossad agent who transforms himself into a suave playboy to ensnare Charlie, and then who morphs himself again into the role of the bother of a terrorist — was a fantastic challenge. “It was such a dream,” he says. “There are moments where you can see these cracks in his veneer, where he’s opening up and he’s emotionally vulnerable. But it was also quite interesting to play on where these moments are genuine or not, because Becker’s manipulative. So there could potentially be moments where he pretends to open up to lose control to get her even closer and get her deeper in, but he’s actually faking it within the fiction. So it gets very layered, and very meta.”