Famed Swedish actor Stellan Skarsgård kept the crowd engaged at Santa Barbara’s Arlington Theatre on Wednesday night with witty reflections of his decades-long, storied career. 

Skarsgård, 74, is up for an Academy Award for his supporting role in “Sentimental Value,” a Norwegian family drama that also stars Elle Fanning and Virtuoso Award recipient Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas. Skarsgård is already a two-time Golden Globe recipient, a Primetime Emmy Award winner and a Critics’ Choice Award winner and nominee.

It was for “Sentimental Value” that Skarsgård was honored Wednesday evening, accepting the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Montecito Award from actor Josh Brolin.

“What a nice thing to be in Santa Barbara, to be able to do (this). I had to drive 10 minutes to get here, which is a real pain in my ass,” Brolin, a Montecito resident, joked. 

In a conversation with IndieWire Editor-At-Large Anne Thompson, Skarsgård took the theater through his decades-long career, split up by clips of his earlier English-language films (“Breaking the Waves,” “Good Will Hunting,” “The Hunt for Red October”) through his blockbusters (“Thor,” “Dune,” “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”), among others. 

Skarsgård is “always in demand,” Thompson told the crowd. “He could be a charismatic leading man, he can be a character actor, a hero, a villain, a lover, a father (…) He can do all of it.”

Skarsgård got his start on the amateur theater stage at roughly age 10 before joining the Swedish TV series, “Bombi Bitt och jag,” at age 16 in 1968. 

He dropped out of school at age 17 (“It was too slow for me,” he told the crowd). He has made appearances in more than 120 films since his 1972 film debut at age 20 in the Swedish film “Strandhugg i somras.” 

That number doesn’t include his roles in television shows and acclaimed miniseries such as “Chernobyl,” which won 10 Emmy awards, and “Andor,” the Star Wars political spy thriller series. 

Over roughly an hour, Skarsgård described working with directors such as Lars von Trier (“Breaking the Waves,” “Dancer in the Dark,” “Dogville,” “Melancholia,” “Nymphomanic”), Hans Petter Moland (“Zero Kelvin,” “A Somewhat Gentle Man,” “Aberdeen”), Denis Villeneuve (“Dune,” “Dune: Part Two”), and beyond. 

He called “Good Will Hunting” writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon “extremely talented” after Thompson showed a pivotal scene between Skarsgård and the late Robin Williams. Thompson also took the audience through Skarsgård’s first movie-musical music experience with “Mamma Mia!”

By his own admission, Skarsgård couldn’t sing and his dancing was “terrible,” he told the audience.

“Can you imagine, working every day, to ‘Vous,’ and not being able to dance?” he said. (ABBA’s “Voulez-Vous” is performed at a pivotal, high-energy moment in “Mamma Mia.”)

“Forty other professional dancers throwing out their legs in the air and everything, and then there’s me and Colin Firth. You wake up in the middle of the night, you know, (singing) ‘Voulez-Vous.’ You can get anybody to do anything if you ‘Voulez-Vous.’” 

With Lars von Trier’s “Nymphomaniac” — a film Skarsgård said pushed the limits of “what patience the audience had for digression” — von Trier called Skarsgård up and asked him to play the lead. 

“‘My next film will be a pornography,’ Skarsgård said, mimicking von Trier’s voice. “‘I’d like you to play the main lead in it.’ 

“Yes, Lars.” 

“‘But you will not get to f—.’”

“Yes, Lars.” 

“‘And we show your dick at the last minute of the film, and it will be really floppy.’”

“I’m coming,” Skarsgård recapped, to howling laughter from the audience. 

His multi-movie role in the “Thor” and “Avengers” series as physicist and professor Dr. Erik Selvig brought him into the world of comic books. (He confessed he once asked if there was any money in comic books. There was, he discovered.)

He criticized the current Marvel Universe, calling it “more and more corporate” and “sterilized” compared to when earlier directors had more control. 

Beyond the emotional journey of becoming someone else on stage and on screen, he spoke about the physical side of the heavy prosthetics that were tacked on for the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies and other theater roles. For “Pirates,” he was in the chair for hours to become Bootstrap Bill Turner and his barnacled existence.

“I don’t think any part of my body has not been done in prosthetics — and I mean any,” he said.

Skarsgård also took the audience on a sadder journey, describing how his 2022 stroke caused memory problems. For the filming of “Dune: Part Two” and season two of “Andor,” he was fed his lines through an earpiece. 

“I couldn’t remember the lines, and I still can’t,” he said. 

But in “Sentimental Value,” which came out in 2025, Skarsgård is “unleashed,” Thompson said, playing a celebrated film director and insensitive father of two. 

Brolin said he worked with Skarsgård on “Dune.” He compared what Skarsgård did as the slimy antagonist Baron Vladimir Harkonnen to Marlon Brando’s performance in “Apocalypse Now.” 

Skarsgård’s performances are always “quite strange” and “always stratospherically more than good,” Brolin said.

He counted Skarsgård among the great actors, the “untouchables” he has gotten “tongue-tied with.”

“In this era of Instagram gratification, Stellan Skarsgård continues to remind us what happens when a performance creeps into your psyche and stays with you, churning wet clay inside of you, changing slightly, maybe, your perception of how you may, indeed, might view the world,” Brolin said. 

Brolin said he cried at the end of  “Sentimental Value” at the look of understanding between Skarsgård’s character and his on-screen daughter.

When he presented the award, Brolin and Skarsgård shared a hug as the audience offered Skarsgård a standing ovation, whistles and cheers. 

“I’m really f—–g moved,”  Skarsgård said. “(…) I’ve been talking so much now, I don’t have any more words to give.”