Alexander Skarsgård is certainly tall, and many fans would say he’s handsome as hell — but is he the inspiration behind “Wildest Dreams” by Taylor Swift? The actor has finally addressed it.
After years of listeners speculating that the pop star wrote the ballad about him, Skarsgård — whom Swift worked with on movie The Giver more than a decade ago — acknowledged the rumors on an episode of Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert posted Monday (July 21). The topic first came up when the host shared, “My 12-year-old is completely obsessed with Taylor Swift, and I have been telling her for six years that the song ‘Wildest Dreams’ was written about me.”
“And they’re like, ‘No it’s not, Dad,’ and I go, ‘Listen to the f–king words,’” Shepard continued before quoting some of Swift’s lyrics. “‘He’s so tall and handsome as hell …’ I’m like, ‘Who else could that be about?’”
Skarsgård did not end up saying directly whether he thinks the 1989 fan-favorite is about him, but he did joke, “It’s about Brad Pitt, guys, let’s be honest.”
“I wrote the lyrics to that song myself and sent it to Taylor,” the True Blood alum also quipped. “‘Taylor, here’s what you should say.’”
Noting that he was nervous to comment officially on the song, not wanting to invoke the wrath of Swifties either way, Skarsgård did play along with Shepard’s assertion that the 14-time Grammy winner indeed penned “Wildest Dreams” about the Parenthood star. When Shepard recalled Swift performing the track at her Eras Tour stop in Portugal — at which the comedian was present with daughter Lincoln, whom he shares with Kristen Bell — Skarsgård joked, “I wasn’t in the crowd in Lisbon … I wasn’t there, so it was clearly about you.”
“Aren’t we all?” Skarsgård added when Shepard’s cohost, Monica Padman, noted that she’s a big fan of Swift. “We’re all Swifties.”
Skarsgård and Swift’s paths crossed while filming The Giver in 2013, a year after which the musician dropped 1989. The album featured “Wildest Dreams” as one of its singles, with Swift pairing the track — which reached No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 — with a music video depicting herself as an actress who falls in love with her costar while on a film set in Africa. The Giver also happens to have been shot in Africa, and Swift sported dark hair in both the dystopian film and in her visual for the song.
Rumors that Skarsgård was Swift’s subject for “Wildest Dreams” practically wrote themselves from there, but the singer has never commented on them. While they were working together on The Giver, however, Skarsgård and Swift were photographed going out to dinner with costar Katie Holmes, and later, the actor gushed about jamming out with the Eras headliner on set.
“We had a piano in the hotel lobby,” he told TIME in 2014. “People would take turns and play the piano and sing. I was better on the couch with my beer, howling along. It was really lovely, actually.”
Watch Skarsgård’s full interview on Armchair Expert above.
