The character is a 1,000-year-old vampire who presides as the "sheriff" of a district in Louisiana. (One of the more amusing aspects of the show's universe is the notion that the undead are subject to the same ba±ing bureaucratic structures as the rest of us.) He's evolved from a relatively minor character in the show's first season to one that threatens to eclipse the nominal romantic leads.

In no small part this is because women have gone nuts for the particular brand of Scandinavian good looks Skarsgård brings to the party. Used to be, the sexuality that kept female viewers damp-palmed for vampire stories was at least marginally subtextual. Now—whether in True Blood or Twilight—it's not only front and center but somehow requiring of "teams" rooting for one creature or another to successfully plant his teeth in the fetching young heroine. (Dracula never suffered the indignity of I'M ON TEAM VLAD T-shirts.) In the fictional town of Bon Temps, Team Eric has been ascendant for several seasons now—and is likely to stay so when season four begins, June 26, revealing an entirely new and more vulnerable side of Northman's character.

Similarly, a new chapter of Skarsgård's career is about to begin with a run of wildly disparate films: First comes Melancholia, set to premiere in Cannes, in which he performs for the first time on-camera alongside his father; then, in September, a remake of the classic Sam Peckinpah movie Straw Dogs; and finally there's next year's board-game-based blockbuster Battleship, already legendary, whatever its eventual virtues, as emblematic of the dearth of Hollywood imagination.

For now, though, he can still slip unnoticed and unmolested into the line of tourists and families waiting to board the stately MV Two Harbors. Soon we're chugging past the regal hulk of the Queen Mary in its permanent Long Beach dock and out into calm, glassy seas. Even before he first went whale-watching off Monterey and started the campaign that so irks his dad, Skarsgård was obsessed with whales, forcing his parents to read to him from a picture book filled with them every night as a boy. What he responds to, he says, is what everybody responds to: the combination of grandeur and grace. "They're the size of three buses, and yet they move with such calm confidence," he says.

The water, too, is Skarsgård's element; he grew up on and around the Baltic Sea, ferrying through the Stockholm archipelago, vacationing at the family's spartan compound on Öland, off Sweden's southeastern coast. "I miss it," he says as we pick up speed, wind whipping across the deck. "Here, I live a few miles from the ocean"—in the Hollywood Hills—"but I'll wake up and think, 'Fuck, I haven't seen it for three weeks.' "

Stature aside, Skarsgård may look like any number of other young Hollywood hotshots, and his accent is convincing enough that Battleship director Peter Berg didn't realize he was foreign until after he'd hired him and they'd had lunch. ("I guess I'm not that observant," Berg says, when asked what he made of that last name with its funny little circle over the a.) But Skarsgård remains defiantly, definitively a Swede. He spends all his available vacation time back in Sweden and maintains a bemused regard for the differences between Los Angeles and what he considers home.

"You walk into the coffee shop, and the girl asks how your day is. When I first moved here, I loved that. I know it's shallow and superficial and she doesn't give a fuck about my day, but I still like it," he says. Sweden, by contrast, is more reserved. "It's difficult to get to know a Swede. But once you do, you're in," he says. And there's a stronger sense of boundaries. "You're never going to see a television show The Skarsgårds."