Succession: Alexander Skarsgård’s Lukas Matsson Thrives on Chaos

Warning: Spoilers for Succession season four, episode seven to follow.

Alexander Skarsgård’s antagonistic tech bro Lukas Matsson has spent the last season-plus of Succession splintering the Roy family. Late in the show’s third season, his GoJo offer essentially severed Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) relationships with his children, Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Shiv (Sarah Snook), and Roman (Kieran Culkin), and demolished any trust left in Shiv’s marriage to Tom (Matthew Macfadyen). This season, he’s again disrupting the Roy family’s toxic status quo—needling a grief-ridden Roman into a mountaintop breakdown, belittling Kendall in person and in ill-advised Tweets, and courting Shiv into betraying her brothers by aligning with him. 

In the show’s latest episode, “Tailgate Party,” Matsson wreaks more havoc on the Roys’ home turf—sweeping into Shiv and Tom’s tony triplex on election eve, behaving erratically in front of a powerful crowd, and eventually revealing that GoJo is kind of a fraud. Though his company’s bogus numbers alarm Shiv–who has backstabbed her brothers and “nailed [her]self on the Matsson cross” for this alliance—Matsson doesn’t seem too bothered by that detail. 

“He’s got these terrible numbers, and he just charges forward with this ‘move fast and break things’ approach,” Skarsgård tells Vanity Fair in a recent phone call. “He’s relentless—it’s like, ‘We’ll figure it out. It’s nothing.’ He leans into the chaos of it all and thrives on it.”

Skarsgård says he didn’t know of this Matsson plot twist until season four was well under way. When Succession creator Jesse Armstrong initially reached out to him about playing Matsson, the character was only slated to appear in two episodes. “I was such an admirer of Jesse’s work—from Peep Show, his old show back in the UK—and I thought Succession was brilliant. To come on and do two episodes, I was beyond excited to do that.” When Succession wrapped its third season, Skarsgård believed that he was hanging up his tech-bro sweatpants. 

But in early 2022, Armstrong rang Skarsgård “to ask if I would be interested in revisiting Matsson.” The Succession creator gave the actor a rough idea where Matsson would pick up in the new season—“not that he had to convince me, because I had the most amazing time on those few episodes I did last year,” Skarsgård says. Armstrong talked about “the broader business ideas of the season and how Matsson would come into this storyline with the siblings.” Armstrong set up Matsson’s broad arc, but did not mention anything about GoJo’s hinky numbers. 

Armstrong did, however, make “a little weird side note, that potentially there was a girl whom Matsson was seeing. It’s kind of over, but he’s sending her blood bricks.” Skarsgård interrupted Armstrong. “I was like, ‘I’m sorry, Jesse, what was that?’ He said, ‘Frozen bricks of blood, as kind of a joke.’”

Says Skarsgård, “There was something so delicious about that. It was so deeply disturbing but also funny and weird. I was thrilled to hear that.” (The detail was so fascinating that The New York Times recently covered it: “According to Natalie Jones, a psychotherapist in California who specializes in relationships and narcissism, the type of person, like Matsson, who would send ‘bizarre things,’ especially in a nonconsensual manner, is calculated, disruptive and willing to go to extremes to influence or seek sympathy.”)

The actor didn’t know of GoJo’s whack numbers until filming was underway, but that didn’t fluster him. “I thought it added to the eccentricities of the character—the fact that he’s so confident and such a bulldozer in many ways,” says Skarsgård. “Jesse obviously knew how he wanted to wrap it up, but there’s an incredible fluidity to the show. There are a lot changes from day one to day 97—Jesse and the other writers are very nimble. If they see something on the day that they respond to and find interesting, they might lean into that more. Something that might have looked great on paper and is not as exciting in front of the camera, they’ll pull back. There would often be quite significant script changes late because they would constantly tweak stuff—get excited about something and then explore that storyline a bit deeper.”

Skarsgård confirms that the Swedish-born Matsson “is an amalgamation of…[Spotify co-founder] Daniel Ek and a little bit of Elon Musk. He’s inspired by several real-life people, but then there’s a lot of creative freedom and some idiosyncratic details that are unique to Matsson.” 

There’s the blood brick thing, for starters. (Neither Ek nor Musk have been known to send ex-lovers blood.) And Skarsgård has had a hand in his character’s wardrobe—making sure that Matsson pops against everyone around him in smart power suits. As the actor told VF earlier this week, he wore his own T-shirt, casual pants, and slides for a high-stakes season three meeting with Logan and Roman at his character’s Lake Como villa. During the meeting, Matsson suggested GoJo acquire Royco rather than the other way around—and Skarsgård liked the idea of the character being underdressed as “a bit of a power move. There’s something quite eccentric and weird about him talking about one of the potentially biggest mergers or deals in the history of the business” clad in worn leisurewear. “I thought it added a lot to who I pictured Matsson was.”