Succession S4: Alexander Skarsgard Says Lukas Matsson 'Gets What He Deserves' In The End
Contains spoilers for "Succession" Season 4 Episode 7 — "Tailgate Party"
On a show full of chaotic, bizarre rich people — just look at Kieran Culkin's Roman Roy, who has no shortage of total oddities — it's a testament to Alexander Skårsgard that his tech-bro billionare manages to stand out. Lukas Matsson is a Snapchat-filter yieling, sweatpants-wearing, blood brick-sending freak who just so happens to have billions of dollars, and with those dollars, he wants to purchase Waystar Royco and the television network ATN from the Roy siblings. In the wake of their father Logan's (Brian Cox) death, Roman, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), and Shiv (Sarah Snook) find themselves at odds over the fate of the company; Roman and Kendall want to tank the deal all together, while Shiv is secretly working with Matsson.
Speaking to Collider, Skårsgard opened up about Mattson, learning how "Succession" would end from creator Jesse Armstrong, and how it'll all shake out for his character. "We talked about it quite late, actually, about how it would end," he revealed. "I didn't feel like I needed to know when we were shooting the first half of it. It didn't really affect my character or the way I approached him. So, with the succession of it all, we had a conversation maybe two months before we shot the very end of the season, or the end of the show, to get more into the specifics of how it would go down."
So how what is Matsson's fate? Well, Skårsgard was blunt: "I thought it made perfect sense. I think Lukas gets what he deserves.
Lukas Mattson has a lot of terrible secrets, but he shares them with an unlikely confidante
Harkening back to the season's fifth episode, "Kill List," Skårsgard discusses the moment where, in conversation with Shiv alone, he reveals that he sent bricks of blood to his head of communications Ebba (Eili Harboe) after their intimate relationship soured. So why does he tell Shiv, the daughter of the Roy family who could take this information directly to her brothers?
According to the actor, it all comes down to the fact that Matsson immediately feels an unlikely bond with Shiv. Asked if they'd improved any of the bizarre details, he said, "There's definitely room to improvise on the show ... That scene with Sarah [Snook] was verbatim, the way it was scripted, even down to the dot-dot-dots between when I'm stuttering or stopping."
The performances on "Succession" are part of what make the entire show so excellent, and Snook has been better than ever this season. As her frequent scene partner, Skårsgard spoke highly of the actress, unsurprisingly. "It was such a beautifully written scene, and playing it was a real treat," he said. "Sarah is so phenomenal. Her reaction to this outlandish thing that he's telling her, and how it was a joke, and then it wasn't a joke, and then it became a joke again, and now it's in weird, creepy territory again, was so disturbing and so rewarding. I loved every second of it."
Are Matsson's bricks of blood a reference to Skårsgard's previous HBO role?
Throughout his career, Skårsgard has shown a sort of alliance to HBO. After rising to prominence as a series regular on "True Blood," he won an Emmy for his role in the first season of "Big Little Lies" — so is Matsson's odd "bricks of blood" predilection related to his role as Eric Northman on the steamy vampire series?"
After the interviewer noted that his, uh, gift to Ebba could be a "True Blood" reference, Skårsgard seemed tickled. "Yeah, there's definitely a little opportunity to read into the possibility that it could be a nod to the good old vampire days," he said.
As the sheriff of his vampire district in Louisiana, Skårsgard's Eric is a former Swedish Viking who's over a thousand years old and, like so many other vampires, takes an interest in Sookie Stackhouse (Anna Paquin). Sookie is a telepath, and every time she comes across a vampire — whose minds she cannot read — they find her intriguing, though Eric's interest in her riles up Bill Compton (Thomas Moyer), Sookie's vampire companion turned suitor. Eric is consistently one of the show's cleverest, funniest characters, and it's clear that his performance caught the attention of HBO's top brass; perhaps Armstrong and his team did make this choice as a sly reference for "True Blood" fans.
Ultimately, Matsson might actually be a fraud
At the end of "Tailgate Party," it's revealed that Matsson, who's set to pay a truly enormous sum to acquire Waystar Royco and ATN, might be writing checks that nobody will be able to cash. After Ebba lets it slip to Roman and Kendall that Matsson has been inflating subscriber numbers in India to keep GoJo's market value as high as possible, they tell Shiv, and she confronts him; as it turns out, Matsson tells her there'd need to be "two Indias" to make his numbers even close to correct. Obviously, this is terrible for Shiv, who later says she's worried she's "nailed herself to the Matsson cross" and betrayed her brothers for nothing.
The way Matsson addresses this entire thing is flippantly and as if he doesn't care, even telling Shiv that, clearly, the solution is to just make a second India. Just like the secret about the bricks of blood, he says all of this casually, which Skårsgard says is a huge part of the character. "Sometimes, it's like, 'Oh, by the way...,' and it's something super significant, but he'll treat it as if it's something trivial and that it will be fine. There are bad numbers in India that could ruin the whole company, and ruin the whole deal, and blow it all up, but yeah, it'll be fine. We'll figure it out."