Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård on 'Wicker': 'Two Souls Being Kind to Each Other'

Olivia Colman has played a medieval fisherwoman who marries a wicker husband, and she ranks the script among the best she has ever read. "It's in my top three scripts that I've loved and I've done," she said at the Zurich Film Festival, where "Wicker" celebrated its European premiere after bowing at Sundance.

"It's beautiful, funny and original," Colman added. "And yes, the only way you can sell it is by having a picture of Alex as a very sexy basket."

Directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, "Wicker" adapts Ursula Wills-Jones's short story "The Wicker Husband." Colman plays a fisherwoman who is constantly ostracized — until she marries a husband made of wicker, played by Alexander Skarsgård and created on screen by a basket weaver played by Peter Dinklage. The film's erotic scenes, including an enthusiastic spin on Taylor Swift's "Wood," have generated headlines since Sundance, and its raunchiness surprised some viewers in Zurich.

For Skarsgård, better known for darker roles and no stranger to risqué material after "Pillion," the part demanded a reversal. "To be honest, I found it terrifying. I feel way more comfortable playing dark, twisted, demented characters," he said. "This was a departure and yeah, I was confused in the beginning about how to approach this. He's so sweet, so tender and caring, and all those things that I can't relate to personally."

The wicker husband's body came from Wētā Workshop, the New Zealand effects house behind "The Lord of the Rings." Skarsgård recalled the moment he first saw it at the workshop in Budapest. "It was extraordinary. It really was," he said. "They wanted practical [effects], which was really exciting. This was not going to be a CGI version."

The suit shaped the character as much as the writing. "Stepping into it was also a way of finding the character because it defined his physicality and who he was," Skarsgård said. "We'd done a bunch of tests and scans, but I was shooting something else and they were obviously in New Zealand. Then they built it."

Moving inside it posed its own problems. "It was glued to my face!" Skarsgård said. "It was crucial that [the mask] would move with my facial movements so that it wouldn't be completely flattened, but that meant I had to exaggerate them. Al and Elle, our directors, kept saying that normal movements wouldn't really register. At first, that felt a little strange, like you really had to overact. Luckily, we had a few days to perfect that."

Colman, for her part, had never shared the screen with a comparable scene partner. "I've never done it before, but we're in that magical world where we're just talking to each other," she said. "We got on very well, and giggled a lot. It was lovely to play those two people. Well, one person and a basket."

Beneath its twisted premise — with humor that echoes "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" — the film examines marriage and gender roles. "None of the women [in the film] have their own names, except for the fisherwoman, and she's shunned and ostracized for being sort of ugly and smelly, and unmarriable. But she shows them," Colman noted.

"I like the fact that they are the only equals here. They support each other, listen to each other, take care of each other," she continued. "It was really about these two humans – or, again, a basket – and two souls being kind to each other. We have no same sex marriages in this story, which I just realized and that's a shame, but they're kind to each other and that was the important relationship in the film."

Skarsgård pointed to the film's lightness of touch. "It commented on the patriarchy of our time and on the construct of marriage, but it was done with so much humor. And in a way that didn't feel preachy or too on the nose," he said. "It was so tender, sweet, funny and irreverent, and with a subtlety to it. That's what really spoke to me."

After all, as the film itself would have it, it is all about a girl standing in front of a boy — or a basket — asking him to love her.