The first trailer for The Northman, an upcoming Viking epic from director Robert Eggers, debuted today, giving audiences their first look at the next ambitious project from the filmmaker behind The Witch and The Lighthouse. Alexander Skarsgård, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang, Björk, and Willem Dafoe star in what the official synopsis describes as an "action-filled epic that follows a young Viking prince on his quest to avenge his father’s murder."
In an exclusive interview with IGN, Eggers elaborated on why The Northman is his most mainstream film yet (even though it still packs enough offbeat punch for fans of his past work), its ancient literary inspirations, his deep research into Viking culture, and more.
Eggers confirmed that The Northman is based on the ancient Norse sagas of a vengeful prince that in turn inspired William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “It is definitely Viking Hamlet. Or as one studio executive said, ‘I love this Viking version of The Lion King.’” (As you likely know, The Lion King is one of several films loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s plays.)
While Eggers grew up the son of a Shakespeare professor and has a background in theater, he revealed he was unfamiliar with the Norse source material that spawned Hamlet:
“Honestly, I didn't know a lot about it. Actually, I didn't know about it, period. Honestly. Basically, Alexander Skarsgård and I had lunch, and he said he'd been wanting to make a Viking movie and was developing Viking movies for some time, trying to get something to happen. And I said I had an idea for a Viking movie. I didn't really have an idea for a Viking movie, I had an ending and I knew I wanted it to be a revenge movie. And then I thought, well, Hamlet is a great revenge story. And then, all of a sudden, I realized, oh my goodness, Shakespeare was inspired by Saxo Grammaticus, and the story is an Old Norse story. And so, that led to me writing a treatment based on that. And very quickly, two years later, we were going into production.”
While The Northman draws inspiration from Saxo’s saga of Amleth (yes, Amleth not Hamlet), that’s not the only source Eggers said he’s drawn from for his tale of Viking vengeance:
“I'm not doing straight Saxo Grammaticus, that's for sure. And actually, because it's really the Icelandic saga authors I find more inspiring than Saxo, I felt that if I can use Hamlet as the main thrust of the story, I have this story that everybody knows and everyone can relate to, and then I can indulge in the Viking culture and really have the world-building be thick and rich and immersive, but no one is getting lost. No one is getting confused because we know that uncle killed dad, son has to kill his uncle. The end. You know what I mean? And unlike Shakespeare's protagonist, who's grappling with the idea of murder, if you're a Viking and someone kills your father, you've got to avenge them. There’s no questions asked.” (So expect far less indecision and moping around from Amleth than one is accustomed to seeing from Hamlet.)
The legend of Amleth contains many of the same basic characters and story elements that later appeared in Shakespeare’s play. Alexander Skarsgård plays Amleth (Hamlet), Nicole Kidman plays Queen Gudrun (Queen Gertrude in Hamlet), Ethan Hawke as King Aurvandil (Hamlet’s doomed dad), and Anya Taylor-Joy as Olga, who Eggers said is his film’s equivalent to Ophelia but “only in the fact that she's the love interest. And Ophelia, in her madness, has a little bit of second sight, but Anya[‘s character] is not mad. She's a much stronger character than Ophelia.”
Given that Hamlet sees the ghost of his father in Shakespeare’s play, how fantastical will The Northman get? “There are mystical and supernatural happenings in the film because there was in the interior world of the Viking mind,” Eggers explained. “So since we're trying to be Vikings, we have to create the world as they saw it.”
The Witch and The Lighthouse both utilized period dialect to fully immerse audiences into those characters’ austere environments. While The Northman – which Eggers co-wrote with Lamb co-screenwriter Sjón – similarly uses period-accurate language, the director said these characters won’t sound as “flowery” as those in The Witch or The Lighthouse.
“Sjón, my co-author, and I have tried to do our best version of a fine English translation of an Old Norse saga. Having my Shakespeare background, Sjón would often say, ‘Chill out. Vikings are more blunt and more brutal than that. Don't make it so flowery. They were fine poets, but they were simple.’ And so, that was very enjoyable. And there is some Old Norse and Old Slavic in the film, and then we consulted with linguists and poets and historians on how to do that.” (Some of the film’s ritual scenes will feature characters speaking in Old Norse, while characters whose mother tongue would have been Old Slavic will speak that.)
“We start the film as a lot of sagas start in the Viking diaspora, sort of like in some islands north of Scotland. And then we travel east and finally spend most of the movie in Iceland,” Eggers explained. “We did a ton of research. And I was working with the finest Viking historians and archeologists, and people who are part of the experimental archeology and living history community, to try to figure out what this Viking world from 1,000 years ago would be like."
“I think there's a lot of things that we know about the different Vikings, like in the Celtic world, Vikings in Iceland, Vikings in Norway, Vikings in Sweden, Vikings in what's now Ukraine. But there's a lot of things that we have to use a little bit of this, that, and the other to fill on the gaps about because it is what it is. But to the best of my ability, me and my collaborators did it as authentically as possible.”
“Almost everything we know about Viking clothing is from burials. So there's stuff in the sagas that were written years later, hundreds of years later, that we can kind of say matches certain things about burials. So we could be on the right track, but it could be that if a Viking saw this movie, they'd see everyone is dressed like dead people. So, we don't totally know.”
The Northman is far from the first film made about the Vikings, but how many of those past movies does Eggers find to be accurate in their depiction of the seafaring raiders?
“Not many really. There's an Icelandic movie called Útlaginn, based on [the] Gísli saga. That movie is pretty accurate to the material world. And I hate to say, but the (Kirk) Douglas movie [1958’s The Vikings], for its time, didn't do a bad job, minus the fact that Kirk Douglas doesn't have a beard. … it's a fun movie. It's a great movie. Look, honestly, people haven't really tried to do the Viking age realistically. And I think because it's a lot of wool and not a lot of cool science fiction, rock star stuff, I think it was not easy to find a way to do it accurately and make it seem like a real world, but also make people seem cool and sexy. And part of it is casting the right people and having the attitude. I mean, if you put Anya or Alex in a potato sack, they're still going to look pretty good.”
The trailer for The Northman shows Amleth dueling at a volcano. Eggers, who has described himself as a kid who grew up watching Star Wars and Spielberg movies, is aware that some Star Wars fans may see shades of Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s climactic duel from Revenge of the Sith in this fiery battle sequence – to his chagrin, it would seem.
“It was not in homage to that. And if anything, any time I think about it, it kind of makes me queasy, but I'm sure it's going to happen. It's all good,” Eggers said of the similarities.
There is, however, one popular genre film Eggers wholeheartedly embraces as an influence on The Northman: the 1982 sword and sorcery classic Conan the Barbarian.
“There’s probably too many nods to Conan [in The Northman] because I watched it so much as a kid. It was a seminal film for Sjón as well,” Eggers said. “I've definitely joked that it's like Conan the Barbarian meets Andrei Rublev, and I think neither Milius nor Tarkovsky would've liked this movie.”
A24 has been the domestic distributor of some of the most acclaimed, off-beat genre films in recent years, including The Witch and The Lighthouse. While Universal’s indie division Focus Features released The Lighthouse internationally and Universal handled The Witch overseas, The Northman is Eggers’ first US release to be distributed domestically solely by Focus rather than A24. Does Eggers consider The Northman then to be his first attempt at a truly mainstream release?
The filmmaker said he’s “very proud of (his) collaboration with the studio” on The Northman, which he insists is still very much a Robert Eggers film even as he acknowledges it’s “not an indie movie” in the vein of his past two films. He sees The Northman as “a big epic adventure story that is for mass audiences. Is it still a Robert Eggers movie and is there some weird shit? Absolutely. But also, I think audiences are sophisticated enough to want that.” Eggers then added that if it “is this idea that if I am doing The Lion King, then I can also have valkyries. You know what I mean? And no one is going to get too lost because they know that the son needs to avenge his father, and that's the most important thing.”
The Northman debuts in US theaters on April 22, 2022, in the UK on March 18, and in Australia on March 17.
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In an exclusive interview with IGN, Eggers elaborated on why The Northman is his most mainstream film yet (even though it still packs enough offbeat punch for fans of his past work), its ancient literary inspirations, his deep research into Viking culture, and more.
The Northman is Viking Hamlet
Eggers confirmed that The Northman is based on the ancient Norse sagas of a vengeful prince that in turn inspired William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “It is definitely Viking Hamlet. Or as one studio executive said, ‘I love this Viking version of The Lion King.’” (As you likely know, The Lion King is one of several films loosely inspired by Shakespeare’s plays.)
While Eggers grew up the son of a Shakespeare professor and has a background in theater, he revealed he was unfamiliar with the Norse source material that spawned Hamlet:
“Honestly, I didn't know a lot about it. Actually, I didn't know about it, period. Honestly. Basically, Alexander Skarsgård and I had lunch, and he said he'd been wanting to make a Viking movie and was developing Viking movies for some time, trying to get something to happen. And I said I had an idea for a Viking movie. I didn't really have an idea for a Viking movie, I had an ending and I knew I wanted it to be a revenge movie. And then I thought, well, Hamlet is a great revenge story. And then, all of a sudden, I realized, oh my goodness, Shakespeare was inspired by Saxo Grammaticus, and the story is an Old Norse story. And so, that led to me writing a treatment based on that. And very quickly, two years later, we were going into production.”
The Northman Cast
- Amleth – Alexander Skarsgård
- Queen Gudrun – Nicole Kidman
- Fjolnir – Claes Bang
- Olga – Anya Taylor-Joy
- Thorir the Proud – Gustav Lindh
- King Aurvandil – Ethan Hawke
- Seeress – Björk
- Heimir The Fool – Willem Dafoe
How Similar is The Northman to Hamlet?
While The Northman draws inspiration from Saxo’s saga of Amleth (yes, Amleth not Hamlet), that’s not the only source Eggers said he’s drawn from for his tale of Viking vengeance:
“I'm not doing straight Saxo Grammaticus, that's for sure. And actually, because it's really the Icelandic saga authors I find more inspiring than Saxo, I felt that if I can use Hamlet as the main thrust of the story, I have this story that everybody knows and everyone can relate to, and then I can indulge in the Viking culture and really have the world-building be thick and rich and immersive, but no one is getting lost. No one is getting confused because we know that uncle killed dad, son has to kill his uncle. The end. You know what I mean? And unlike Shakespeare's protagonist, who's grappling with the idea of murder, if you're a Viking and someone kills your father, you've got to avenge them. There’s no questions asked.” (So expect far less indecision and moping around from Amleth than one is accustomed to seeing from Hamlet.)
The legend of Amleth contains many of the same basic characters and story elements that later appeared in Shakespeare’s play. Alexander Skarsgård plays Amleth (Hamlet), Nicole Kidman plays Queen Gudrun (Queen Gertrude in Hamlet), Ethan Hawke as King Aurvandil (Hamlet’s doomed dad), and Anya Taylor-Joy as Olga, who Eggers said is his film’s equivalent to Ophelia but “only in the fact that she's the love interest. And Ophelia, in her madness, has a little bit of second sight, but Anya[‘s character] is not mad. She's a much stronger character than Ophelia.”
Given that Hamlet sees the ghost of his father in Shakespeare’s play, how fantastical will The Northman get? “There are mystical and supernatural happenings in the film because there was in the interior world of the Viking mind,” Eggers explained. “So since we're trying to be Vikings, we have to create the world as they saw it.”
The Language of The Northman
The Witch and The Lighthouse both utilized period dialect to fully immerse audiences into those characters’ austere environments. While The Northman – which Eggers co-wrote with Lamb co-screenwriter Sjón – similarly uses period-accurate language, the director said these characters won’t sound as “flowery” as those in The Witch or The Lighthouse.
“Sjón, my co-author, and I have tried to do our best version of a fine English translation of an Old Norse saga. Having my Shakespeare background, Sjón would often say, ‘Chill out. Vikings are more blunt and more brutal than that. Don't make it so flowery. They were fine poets, but they were simple.’ And so, that was very enjoyable. And there is some Old Norse and Old Slavic in the film, and then we consulted with linguists and poets and historians on how to do that.” (Some of the film’s ritual scenes will feature characters speaking in Old Norse, while characters whose mother tongue would have been Old Slavic will speak that.)
Researching Vikings
“We start the film as a lot of sagas start in the Viking diaspora, sort of like in some islands north of Scotland. And then we travel east and finally spend most of the movie in Iceland,” Eggers explained. “We did a ton of research. And I was working with the finest Viking historians and archeologists, and people who are part of the experimental archeology and living history community, to try to figure out what this Viking world from 1,000 years ago would be like."
“I think there's a lot of things that we know about the different Vikings, like in the Celtic world, Vikings in Iceland, Vikings in Norway, Vikings in Sweden, Vikings in what's now Ukraine. But there's a lot of things that we have to use a little bit of this, that, and the other to fill on the gaps about because it is what it is. But to the best of my ability, me and my collaborators did it as authentically as possible.”
“Almost everything we know about Viking clothing is from burials. So there's stuff in the sagas that were written years later, hundreds of years later, that we can kind of say matches certain things about burials. So we could be on the right track, but it could be that if a Viking saw this movie, they'd see everyone is dressed like dead people. So, we don't totally know.”
Viking Movies
The Northman is far from the first film made about the Vikings, but how many of those past movies does Eggers find to be accurate in their depiction of the seafaring raiders?
“Not many really. There's an Icelandic movie called Útlaginn, based on [the] Gísli saga. That movie is pretty accurate to the material world. And I hate to say, but the (Kirk) Douglas movie [1958’s The Vikings], for its time, didn't do a bad job, minus the fact that Kirk Douglas doesn't have a beard. … it's a fun movie. It's a great movie. Look, honestly, people haven't really tried to do the Viking age realistically. And I think because it's a lot of wool and not a lot of cool science fiction, rock star stuff, I think it was not easy to find a way to do it accurately and make it seem like a real world, but also make people seem cool and sexy. And part of it is casting the right people and having the attitude. I mean, if you put Anya or Alex in a potato sack, they're still going to look pretty good.”
The Thinking Man's Conan Movie
The trailer for The Northman shows Amleth dueling at a volcano. Eggers, who has described himself as a kid who grew up watching Star Wars and Spielberg movies, is aware that some Star Wars fans may see shades of Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi’s climactic duel from Revenge of the Sith in this fiery battle sequence – to his chagrin, it would seem.
“It was not in homage to that. And if anything, any time I think about it, it kind of makes me queasy, but I'm sure it's going to happen. It's all good,” Eggers said of the similarities.
There is, however, one popular genre film Eggers wholeheartedly embraces as an influence on The Northman: the 1982 sword and sorcery classic Conan the Barbarian.
“There’s probably too many nods to Conan [in The Northman] because I watched it so much as a kid. It was a seminal film for Sjón as well,” Eggers said. “I've definitely joked that it's like Conan the Barbarian meets Andrei Rublev, and I think neither Milius nor Tarkovsky would've liked this movie.”
Eggers on Going from A24 to Focus
A24 has been the domestic distributor of some of the most acclaimed, off-beat genre films in recent years, including The Witch and The Lighthouse. While Universal’s indie division Focus Features released The Lighthouse internationally and Universal handled The Witch overseas, The Northman is Eggers’ first US release to be distributed domestically solely by Focus rather than A24. Does Eggers consider The Northman then to be his first attempt at a truly mainstream release?
The filmmaker said he’s “very proud of (his) collaboration with the studio” on The Northman, which he insists is still very much a Robert Eggers film even as he acknowledges it’s “not an indie movie” in the vein of his past two films. He sees The Northman as “a big epic adventure story that is for mass audiences. Is it still a Robert Eggers movie and is there some weird shit? Absolutely. But also, I think audiences are sophisticated enough to want that.” Eggers then added that if it “is this idea that if I am doing The Lion King, then I can also have valkyries. You know what I mean? And no one is going to get too lost because they know that the son needs to avenge his father, and that's the most important thing.”
The Northman debuts in US theaters on April 22, 2022, in the UK on March 18, and in Australia on March 17.
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