Stellan Skarsgård on Ingmar Bergman: ‘The only person I know who cried when Hitler died'

The Guardian

14-07-2025

Stellan Skarsgård has weighed in on famed director Ingmar Bergman's Nazi sympathies as a young adult.
The actor was speaking at the Karlovy Vary film festival in the Czech Republic, where he was promoting Joachim Trier's film Sentimental Value, inspired by the late Swedish director. Skarsgård expressed his personal dislike of Bergman, with whom he worked on a 1986 stage production of August Strindberg's A Dream Play.
'Bergman was manipulative,' said the 74-year-old Swedish actor, as first reported by Variety. 'He was a Nazi during the war and the only person I know who cried when Hitler died. We kept excusing him, but I have a feeling he had a very weird outlook on other people. [He thought] some people were not worthy. You felt it, when he was manipulating others. He wasn't nice.'
Bergman, who died in 2007 at the age of 89, spoke openly of his past sympathies for nazism while growing up in a rightwing Swedish family.
In 1999, the director explained to Maria-Pia Boëthius, author of a book questioning Sweden's neutrality during the second world war, his positive feelings for Hitler after attending a Nazi rally during an exchange trip to Germany in 1934, at the age of 16. 'Hitler was unbelievably charismatic. He electrified the crowd,' he said.
He added that his family put a photo of the fascist dictator next to his bed after, because 'the nazism I had seen seemed fun and youthful.' The book also details how Bergman's brother and friends vandalized the house of a Jewish neighbor with swastikas – and that he was 'too cowardly' to raise objections to the attack.
The director also acknowledged his past Nazi sympathies in his 1987 memoir The Magic Lantern: 'For many years, I was on Hitler's side, delighted by his success and saddened by his defeats.' He told Boëthius that he maintained support for the Nazis until the end of the war, when the exposure of Nazi atrocities in the Holocaust changed his views. 'When the doors to the concentration camps were thrown open,' he said, 'I was suddenly ripped of my innocence.' Bergman went on to explore anguish over the horrors of war in such films as Winter Light, The Silence and Shame.
This is not the first time Skarsgård has criticized Bergman openly – in a 2012 interview with the Guardian's Xan Brooks, Skarsgård said of Bergman: 'I didn't want him near my life.'
'My complicated relationship with Bergman has to do with him not being a very nice guy,' he said at Karlovy Vary. 'He was a nice director, but you can still denounce a person as an asshole. Caravaggio was probably an asshole as well, but he did great paintings.'
Sentimental Value, which premiered to rave reviews at May's Cannes film festival, is tipped for awards success later this year.