Focus Features has released several new photos from Robert Eggers’ The Northman, including a new shot of Alexander Skarsgård as Amleth. Released during IGN Fan Fest, the photos also follow the first trailer for the Viking revenge movie from the director of The Witch and The Lighthouse, as well as a previous look at Skarsgård’s Amleth. Eggers wrote the film with Icelandic novelist/poet Sjón. Skarsgård plays Viking prince Amleth, who watches his father (Ethan Hawke) die after being betrayed by his uncle Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Fjölnir takes Amleth’s mother (Nicole Kidman) captive. Amleth grows up repeating the mantra, “I will avenge you, Father. I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.” The film’s cast includes Anya Taylor-Joy, Björk, and Willem Dafoe.
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“[Historical accuracy] It’s not important to filmmaking, at all really,” Eggers tells IGN of his dedication to accurately recreating the Viking era. “And you can make a great period story without being accurate – you know Coppola’s Dracula is one of the best-designed movies in my opinion but it’s not accurate at all. But this is something that I like, for whatever reason. It excites me.”
Set for release in April, The Northman previously suffered a two-week delay. In its official synopsis, Focus Features describes The Northman as “an action-filled epic that follows a young Viking prince on his quest to avenge his father’s murder.”
Eggers previously explained how The Northman is different from his past films. “The scale is so huge and there are so many more locations and things that I couldn’t do everything or know every prop myself,” Eggers told Collider in 2020. “That’s been a challenge with the new movie…There’s many locations in the film, so we were constantly going on scouts to find places or reassess places that we have found and we’re building sets there. We’re designing all these worlds, building these villages, we’re making thousands of costumes and props, training the horses the things they’ll need to do, designing the shots of the films.”
“There’s a lot more storyboarding,” he continued. “Generally I only storyboard the scenes that have visual effects or animals and stunts, things where all the departments need to be on the same page for it to work out. But this movie there is rarely a scene that isn’t on a boat or doesn’t have a lot of extras. We’re storyboarding most of the film, which is taking a lot of time.”
The Northman opens in theaters on April 22nd.
