Succession season 4: Alexander Skarsgård says barefoot walk wasn't 'planned'

Alexander Skarsgård has played some memorable roles over the course of his career, from brooding, charismatic vampire Eric Northman in True Blood to the titular character in The Legend of Tarzan. In Succession, he plays an erratic but brilliant tech billionaire, Lukas Matsson. Prior to attending the 2023 Met Gala, Skarsgård talked with Vanity Fair about how the barefoot plane scene came about, noting that “it wasn’t really planned.”

In “Living+,” the sixth episode of Succession’s final season, Skarsgård’s Matsson has a clandestine meeting with Shiv Roy (Sarah Snook). His private jet is parked on the tarmac beside hers, and when she refuses to meet him on his plane, he decides to head across the way to her plane. He makes the walk between planes barefoot, a subtle detail but one that is so perfectly fitting for his character.

It turns out that the decision to go barefoot wasn’t scripted. “It wasn’t really planned,” Skarsgård said. “I often wear slides when I show up to set and when we rehearse and I was wearing slides and the private jet we were shooting in had a very, very comfortable carpet. So I took my slides off and was walking around barefoot. And then I thought that that could be quite fun if Matsson — because it makes sense that he takes his shoes off on the plane, but that he doesn’t bother putting his shoes or anything on when he walks over to [Shiv’s] plane. There was something about the geography and the way the planes stood. They were parked like 50 yards from each other and they’re gonna do a wide shot of Matsson walking and I thought it’d be visually quite interesting maybe if he just casually walked out without shoes on.”

Skarsgård also describes a time in season 3 when he wore his own clothes for Matsson’s scene at Lake Como with Logan (Brian Cox) and Roman (Kieran Culkin). “The Roys are always so immaculately tailored, dresses, tuxedos, or suits, all the knitted sweaters — everything’s like incredibly expensive and it looks expensive and just radiates money. I thought it’d be a nice power move in a way if Matsson is the kind of diametrically opposed to that, super casual.”

It’s the little details in Skarsgård’s portrayal of Matsson that has Succession fans buzzing. Check out what they're saying below: