Team Skarsgard talks about why their nominee should be a Pixel Project Male Role Model in a special post, below.
To many, it seems as if Alexander Skarsgard became an overnight star with his role as the yummy, albeit dangerous, Vampire Sheriff and Fangtasia owner Eric Northman on the hit TV series True Blood.
The truth is that Alex—who has been referred to by LA Times Magazine as ‘ego-free’—started his career as a child actor in Sweden. The blond, blue-eyed, six-foot-four Viking heartthrob inherited the acting gene from his father, Swedish screen veteran Stellan Skarsgard. Bitten hard by the acting bug, he went to Hollywood, where he played Sgt. Brad Colbert in the highly popular Generation Kill, an HBO miniseries based on a book by the same name about author Evan Wright’s experience as an embedded reporter with the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion of the United States Marine Corps during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
In 2003, Alex won an Odense International Film Festival Award in both the Grand Prix and Press Award categories for his work in Att döda ett barn, and in 2009, snagged the Best Villain prize at the Scream Awards for the role of Eric Northman in True Blood. He was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor in Television at the Saturn Awards.
Alex is not only a talented actor. He supports a variety of causes, including the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which focuses on improving animal welfare, preventing animal cruelty and abuse, protecting wildlife and providing animal rescue around the world.
He worked with AlexSkarsgard.net to raise funds in his name for the charity Smile Train, which provides free surgery for underprivileged children with cleft lips and palates. He not only gave his blessing to their efforts, but also sent them a note of congratulations. He also lent his name and support to SkarsgardNews.com, which raised nearly $10,000 in donations for Doctors Without Borders for Haitian earthquake relief, and has publicly supported Earth Hour 2010 and Chilean earthquake relief.
He recently donated his favourite t-shirt (from the 90s) for a charity auction benefiting Amnesty International, and attended the 3rd Annual Black Tie Gala for The Art of Elysium, an organization that offers arts workshops to seriously ill children.
If his talent and generosity were not enough to qualify him for Male Role Model status, there is also his down-to-earth nature. Playing Eric Northman has taken the hunky actor to a new level of fame, yet he manages to remain unaffected in an environment where most have ‘gone Hollywood’. As the Millennium Man article in LA Times Magazine says: ‘The actor’s unaffected manner—all the more striking given his angular movie-idol looks—put the set in a state of mild bewilderment. This is, after all, the home of high-maintenance celebrity needs. So when someone as easygoing and ego-free as Skarsgård comes along, we almost don’t know what to do with him.’
Well, we do! Vote for him to be the Pixel Project’s Male Role Model! Go to http://bit.ly/beS59A to vote for Alex, and http://bit.ly/cX7pHp to sign the petition.Remember that signing the petition is just as important as voting! The petition letter will be sent directly to Alexander Skarsgard if he is one of the winning nominees so we need as many names as possible on it!
And please spread the word. It’s time to stop violence against women – together.