AAA<\/p>\n
Alexander Skarsgard has worn his fair share of striking costumes in his time \u2013 the leather motorcycle suit in Pillion (2025) and the loincloth of The Legend of Tarzan (2016) certainly spring to mind. But nothing can top the outfit he wears in Wicker, the brilliantly bonkers film that opens MIFF on Thursday night.<\/p>\n
In this relationship fable, adapted from a short story from Ursula Wills by husband-and-wife team Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson and set in a village sometime between the Middle Ages and the 19th century, Skarsgard plays the Husband, a \u201cman\u201d magicked into being by the Basketmaker (Peter Dinklage) at the behest of the Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman).<\/p>\n
He\u2019s made entirely of willow, and when the sun is behind him, you can even catch glimpses of the sky through the filaments that constitute his hollow body. And yet he\u2019s the perfect embodiment of what the ideal husband (or, indeed, basket) should be: handsome, sturdy, adaptable, useful.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo much of the success of the film revolves around this character not only looking realistic, but he had to be an object of desire too,\u201d says Joe Dunckley, who led the team at New Zealand\u2019s Weta Workshop that created the prosthetic suit Skarsgard wears. \u201cHe had to be the reason the other villagers become jealous and start looking at their own relationships sideways. He had to be attractive. As we joked right from the beginning, he had to be a hot basket.\u201d<\/p>\n
That he most certainly is, in more ways than one.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The suit was made of 3D-printed resin panels, joined together into sections \u2013 carapace, trousers, face mask, sleeves \u2013 that Skarsgard wore over a top-to-toe woollen undergarment. It was, needless to say, hot inside, especially for a Swede.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat was not an easy thing to wear every day,\u201d says Wilson, who was born in Adelaide, lived for several years in Melbourne, and trained in acting in London and New York before finding her way to writing and directing. \u201cHe had to express the performance in a way that holds empathy and love and curiosity. We knew his likeness had to shine through, and that was partly his voice, but they really had to make the mask in his likeness too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Development of the prosthetic suit began 18 months before filming \u2013 \u201cwe knew [the believability of the character] was the biggest challenge, that the movie would live or die on it\u201d, Wilson says \u2013 and moved through 360-degree photography of Skarsgard, laser scanning of his face and body, and a silicon life cast, \u201cthat thing where you sit in a chair and they pour goo on your head and you sit in silence for an hour or so, breathing through a straw\u201d, as Fischer puts it.<\/p>\n
![\"Peter](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/682373647173c180b072215858389f6c43ccc70b.jpeg\")
Peter Dinklage as the Basketmaker.Roadshow<\/p>\n
That was just to get the fit right. Creating a suit that looked and behaved like wicker was the real challenge.<\/p>\n
Weta had actual weavers in the workshop (they\u2019ve been part of the set-up since James Cameron\u2019s Avatar), not to make the costume itself \u2013 \u201cwe knew right away that traditional materials weren\u2019t going to work,\u201d Dunckley says \u2013 but to ensure the synthetic wicker acted the same way real-world willow would.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow you make the characteristics of his face come across in basketry was months of iteration and finding the exact right weave,\u201d says Fischer.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then how do you make his expressiveness come through \u2013 like when he moves his brow [beneath the mask], how do you make that come through [in the mask itself]?<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you watch the movie, it feels like magic,\u201d he continues. \u201cBut it took a year of trial and error and many, many basket weavers designing with real basketry in mind and homing in on the perfect thing before it landed here. It is kind of a magic trick.\u201d<\/p>\n
For all the finesse of the physical suit, it\u2019s digital trickery that creates the impression of a hollow man of woven willow. \u201cThe only things VFX did for that character were those tiny pins of light, just to show that he was hollow,\u201d says Dunckley. \u201cThat was a genius stroke from Eleanor and Alex.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Married](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/b5b10832f4bf88963ec8208cae01ea285e66083a.jpeg\")
Married writer-directors Eleanor Wilson and Alex Huston Fischer on the set of their film Wicker with Olivia Colman as the Fisherwoman and Elizabeth Debicki as the Tailor\u2019s Wife.Roadshow<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a very small part of it, but it\u2019s such a key part,\u201d says Wilson. \u201cWe really wanted those moments to be special but very subtle, so you\u2019re not constantly thinking about the VFX trick, you know.\u201d<\/p>\n
And what do you want people to be thinking about when they watch this unique and really quite extraordinary movie?<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want you to think about your relationship, the dynamic, the expectations, the things you take for granted, the things you want that you don\u2019t have,\u201d says Fischer.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut don\u2019t think too hard about it,\u201d adds Wilson. \u201cDon\u2019t break up your life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Save You have reached your maximum number of saved items. Remove items from your saved list to add…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":834760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[64,63,447,134],"class_list":["post-834759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=834759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/834760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=834759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=834759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=834759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}