Most days, the cheekbone-gifted man you see above is Alexander Skarsgård. Yesterday evening, however, this was Alexander Skarsgård:
Yes, that statuesque blonde with the unending hairdo, the wing-like lashes, and the golden gown is the actor in drag, at the premiere of Diary of a Teenage Girl at San Francisco’s Castro Theater.
In the film, he plays Monroe, the boyfriend of a teenage girl’s mother (Kristen Wiig) who ends up having an affair with said teenage girl (Bel Powley). Though Skarsgård doesn’t appear in drag in the film, it is set in San Francisco during the mid ’70s, on the tail end of the gay liberation movement, so there is some vague thematic/locational/temporal link to drag culture.
But though it’s seductive to search for an explanation (the Daily Mail, for example, conjectured that it’s a shout-out to his costar, drag performer Peaches Christ) as to Skarsgård’s scintillating transformation, placing reason atop these glorious images might also flatten their magic. Why shouldn’t Skarsgård have looked like this last night? Surely some would agree that it’d be a delight if Skarsgård looked like this far more often.
But since that may not be the case, here are some more images to relish from his red carpet appearance that are circulating:
It seems fair to give a resounding “shante, you stay” to this ravishing debutante, whose name is still (and may forever remain) unknown. Diary of a Teenage Girl is out August 7.