Max von Sydow
Net Worth 2024, Height, Wiki, Age, Bio

The film you hear about the most is The Exorcist. When people come up to me and say, 'Oh, you scared me!'... I was the good guy in that film!

The characters they offer me are most of the time grandfathers, or old fathers who are nice people but not terribly interesting. Most of the time they're not very well, and very often they die on page 36.

I want variety, and I have had it, but at times it's been difficult and tough to achieve because people have a tendency to typecast you. If you have been successful doing one thing, they want you to copy that success all the time. And I hate that.

You see, I had an odd upbringing. My father was a scholar, a professor in the town where I was born, and his subject was folklore. He was a master at telling stories -- folk tales and adventures. I was very shy as a boy, and heard more fairy tales than the average child because of my father. This and my shyness prompted my imagination, and led to an interest in make believe.

Playing Christ, I began to feel shut away from the world. A newspaper became one of my biggest luxuries. I noticed that some of my close friends began treating me with reverence. Playing the role of Christ was like being in a prison. It was the hardest part I've ever had to play in my life. I couldn't smoke or drink in public. I couldn't. The most difficult part of playing Christ was that I had to keep up the image around the clock. As soon as the picture finished, I returned home to Sweden and tried to find my old self. It took six months to get back to normal. When I finished the role of Christ, I felt as though I'd been let out on parole. A man who has served 18 months isn't eager to go back to prison.

Acting is such a weird profession. It's such a futile thing. Even when it's there on film, there's nothing really to it. It is not like making a piece of furniture or writing a book.

I have been brought up as a stage actor and there is where I feel at home, but I still feel that the cinema has one great advantage over the theater. Namely, proximity to the audience. Of course in a film an actor always has only himself as an audience while on a stage he can achieve a result along with his audience. However, when you stand on a stage, you can never work with your face in the same way as you can in front of a camera.

At home [in Sweden], the actor's profession was not considered particularly reputable, but being an actor or star in a Hollywood film was something very important in American eyes. Then I slowly realized that as an actor in Sweden you were allowed to be involved in some kind of artistic project which could be a flop and yet still be justifiable if it carried artistic weight and ambitions. In Hollywood, on the other hand, if you do not succeed you are nobody. You become a mere piece of paper with a figure on it. You are just as good-or bad-as your last film was financially. And while Sweden remains sufficiently small for you to work in, say, Malmö and still make films in Stockholm, in the States you either work in Hollywood or you live somewhere else and you work for the legitimate theater.

Sometimes I receive strange letters, and occasionally people come up to me in the street and say odd things. They want to be deceived, so it is difficult to disabuse them. At times, it is tiring not to be allowed to be a private person. If you are really marked out as a film star in the United States, then it must be absolutely exhausting and hard to maintain your integrity. Fortunately, Swedes are very reserved as a people and seldom show their emotions or feelings in public, so one is not subject to that kind of pressure in the country where I come from.