Well, the new trailer for Wicker proves one thing right away: You couldn’t make Alexander Skarsgård ugly even if you wanted to. The makeup department failed miserably there. What they did do, however, is complete Skarsgård’s career bucket list. “Most male actors dream of playing Hamlet at some point in their career. I never did. My dream was always to have nipples made out of wicker,” he said in a statement released with the first-look trailer, thanking directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, and the brilliant artists at Wētā (the same effects company behind The Lord of the Rings) for making it possible.
That strange sentence is not a quote you’ll easily forget, and it should be enough to convince you to check out Black Bear Pictures’ Wicker, the upcoming fantasy comedy which stars Skarsgård, Olivia Colman, Peter Dinklage, and Elizabeth Debicki. The film was well-received when it premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. And it looks really funny, romantic, and slightly weird, of course – a strange combination of all three things at the same time.
Wicker adapts Ursula Wills-Jones’ short story The Wicker Husband and follows the story of a lonely fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) who is mocked by the people in her village for being “single and stinky.” Rather than accept her place as the town outcast, she asks the local basketmaker, played by Peter Dinklage, to weave her the perfect husband. And, as you can guess from the title, he manages to get it right. Through a bit of magic, the woven husband comes to life.
His arrival, of course, isn’t met with celebration. The town folk become jealous, and eventually the odd couple’s love for one another flips the social order upside down.
The first trailer for the film opens up with Colman mocked by the town’s folk for not having a husband. We then see Dinklage’s character preparing his greatest creation of all time. The trailer then cuts to the couple “enjoying married life”, with plenty of funny, raunchy jokes – including the two breaking their bed. “Is someone being murdered?” a neighbor asks.
Colman couldn’t stop praising both the screenplay and her co-star. She called Wicker “one of the best and most original scripts I’d read in a long time” and admitted Skarsgård’s performance surprised her once he stepped into costume. “Alex is funny, intelligent, and beautiful anyway. In the wicker costume, he’s breathtaking. Everything is exaggerated. He’s a work of art. Alex fills the Wicker Husband with a beautiful soul.”
Early reviews for the film have already been really positive. Wicker has already earned a 95% Rotten Tomatoes score. That’s a strong start for a film with such a bizarre concept.
Wicker opens in select movie theaters on October 23. It gets a wider release on October 30. From the looks of its first trailer, this odd little love story might become one of the year’s most memorable originals. It certainly already has one of the year’s best actor quotes.
