Stockholm: Alexander Skarsgård is pretty out there with his work and red carpet looks, but the Wicker star is extremely private when it comes to his home life with actress Tuva Novotny and their son.
And at least one key component of the Swedish actors’ romance is that they’re on the same page about keeping their careers separate from their personal business.
“For many years, I wouldn’t do interviews, I wouldn’t watch my own stuff,” Novotny — who shares a 4-year-old son with Skarsgård and has two daughters from a previous relationship — told Vogue Scandinavia in 2024. “I don’t see myself as a public person. My job is public and then what I do outside of work is super private.”
A Shared Instinct for Privacy
That’s obviously fine with Skarsgård. Back when he was single, he told The Guardian in 2018 that he didn’t talk about relationships as “a way to protect it.”
“When I was a kid, that’s how my father dealt with it,” he explained, referring to actor Stellan Skarsgård. “I wouldn’t say it kept him sane, because he’s pretty crazy, but somewhat. The fact that he protected his private life so much, and protected my mum who is not an actor or a public figure.”
Skarsgård is the eldest of Stellan and physician My Skarsgård’s six children, plus he has two half-brothers from his father’s second marriage. “Eventually when it’s time to have kids and stuff, I want to have nine,” he quipped to The Guardian. “I want to beat my dad.”
His own branch of the family tree sprouted toward the end of 2022, but he didn’t confirm he had become a father until March 2023, when he accepted congratulations on the Succession fourth season premiere red carpet.
Life in Södermalm
They’ve never shared how they met, but he and Novotny have now been together for seven years and make their home in Stockholm’s Södermalm district, surrounded by members of Skarsgård’s “very big, very tight family.”
“Lots of drinking, lots of smoking, lots of crazy, eccentric people,” he told The Times in an interview published October 17. “But a very fun environment to grow up in. To this day my entire extended family live within a 10-minute walk from here.”
As for his own household, the 50-year-old quipped that his partner’s teenage daughters think he’s “deeply uncool, of course.” But since becoming a dad, his “priorities have changed.”
“It was easy, before, to be spontaneous. I’m quite adventurous, so if an opportunity arose to go to the South Pole or Greenland, or sail across the Atlantic, I did it.”
He now saves most of his risk-taking for the screen — as his role in Wicker, about a lonely fisherwoman who has the town weaver craft a perfect husband out of the titular material, would attest.
‘Spending Time With My Boy Is Incredibly Precious’
Skarsgård is still interested in exploring the world, he noted, “but spending time with my boy is incredibly precious. It’s made me more discerning. I don’t feel the need to work nonstop the way I did before. If I take on a job it has got to be special enough to warrant being away.”
When his father starred in 2025’s Sentimental Value as a self-absorbed filmmaker estranged from his adult daughters, Stellan and his children enjoyed poking fun at assumptions that the role was true to life.
Skarsgård told The Times that while he didn’t talk to his dad much about work when he was younger — preferring to make his “own mistakes and stupid decisions” — the 75-year-old now “feels like a friend who’s also a colleague that you’re shooting the s— with.”
But as a kid, the True Blood alum did wish for a more average upbringing. “My dream was for my family to be normal and fit in and be like everybody else’s family,” he said during a sit-down with Stellan for Variety last December. “For you to have a briefcase, that would’ve been fantastic, rather than a weird tote bag that you found in India.”
Now it’s Skarsgård’s son who will one day have thoughts about his father’s beguiling see-through Saint Laurent footwear — but it’s the chaotic portion of his childhood he wants to avoid passing on, not the creative part.
Novotny on Work and Parenthood
On her end, Novotny “wasn’t really interested in performing at all” as a child, she told Vogue, but growing up in her own big, artistic family with her actress mother, director father and five siblings, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I wasn’t pushed, I was inspired.”
And though the Annihilation actress could do without the interviews and red carpets, she “always worked through parenthood.” “It’s super important that you keep yourself intact,” she noted.
“Work for me is a place where I feel inspired and I meet people — there’s that social aspect. Bringing that back home is a good thing for parenting — for me, at least.”
Skarsgård still loves the “traveling circus” aspect of being an actor, he told Variety in February, but it’s now time “to balance that with family life and making sure I can be present for my kid. I can’t be as selfish and narcissistic as I was before.”
