In ‘Tarzan,’ Skarsgard found instant chemistry with Margot Robbie

LOS ANGELES — While Alexander Skarsgard had seen Margot Robbie in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” he hadn’t met his “The Legend of Tarzan” co-star “until I invited her over to dinner at my place a few months before we were scheduled to begin filming,” the actor said. “It was uncanny. From the moment I opened the door, I just knew that we would click — it was completely instant.”

Sitting next to him in a Los Angeles hotel suite, the actress nodded vigorously. “We hit it off right away. I immediately felt like I was talking to one of my best girlfriends,” giggled Robbie — eliciting a guffaw and big eyebrow raise from Skarsgard.

“Of course, he has much better abs!” added Robbie with an even bigger laugh.

In the film, opening Friday, the actress plays Jane to Skarsgard’s Tarzan/John Clayton, who is is compelled to return to the jungle he had long since departed. While “The Legend” is a big, sweeping action adventure, Skarsgard noted that “the relationship between Tarzan and Jane is very central to the whole movie. If that romance is not bought by the audience, I don’t think the film really would work.”

While chatting about the couple’s intense on-screen love for each other, Robbie said she wanted to put to rest a rumor that had been flying around on the internet. “For some reason this story got out there that I really seriously injured Alexander while we shot that big sex scene in the tree,” said the actress. “That all came about because [director] David Yates had some ideas about adding a degree of animal sexuality to that scene. … I just want to make it clear I did not hit my co-star inappropriately!”

Skarsgard quickly agreed, “That’s true. No damage. That’s for sure. I don’t even remember how that story could have gotten started!”

For the duo’s co-star Samuel L. Jackson, the appeal of “The Legend of Tarzan” was partially inspired by the fact his character, George Washington Williams, “was actually based on a real-life person, as was the case with Leon Rom, Christoph Waltz’s character,” said Jackson. “I liked the fact that this was not just another retelling of the fantasy tale we’ve all seen so many times before, but actually included some historical facts.

“Before I started filming, I read ‘King Leopold’s Ghost,’ which is a terrific book about the king of Belgium that chronicles how horrific it was — how Leopold and his henchmen devastated the native people of the Congo, all to extract rubber and other natural resources from that land they had conquered. … So many lives were extinguished. It really was a holocaust — before the [World War II] holocaust,” said Jackson, reflecting on the days when Belgium wielded colonial power over the people of the areas they controlled in 19th Century West Africa.

On a lighter note, Jackson also reflected on his longtime fascination with the Tarzan saga. “I came along after the Johnny Weissmuller years — from when he played Tarzan — but I do remember watching his movies on black-and-white TV with my mother when I was a kid. Gordon Scott’s Tarzan was more my era, but I clearly remember watching a lot of the others, including the ones starring Ron Ely and Lex Barker. … It’s just one of those stories that has continued to fascinate audiences, and I’d predict while we’re now about a century after Edgar Rice Burroughs created the character, we’ll be revisiting Tarzan on the big screen for probably another century to come!”