Jonathan OlleyWell hello again, Alexander Skarsgård.
The 39-year-old Swedish star showcases his hot, shirtless body extensively in an extended trailer for The Legend of Tarzan that was released Thursday. And the actor, who often stripped down as Eric Northman in True Blood, is more ripped than ever.
"I obviously had a very, very good trainer," Skarsgård told E! News' Marc Malkin exclusively this week. "I basically had him and a nutritionist. I've never done anything like this before, this extreme. I was just really nervous. It was a big challenge and I didn't know how my body would respond to the training and diet."
The actor said his training involved doing many crutches and that for months, he ate "a lot of chicken cutlets."
Skarsgård plays the title character in The Legend of Tarzan, the latest among many adaptations of the popular story of a man raised among apes in an African jungle.
He also said a trapeze artist did most of his "crazy" stunts. Tarzan is known for his ability to travel by swinging on vines.
"I took off and did a little bit of it and then I sat in my chair with my coffee," Skarsgård joked.
In The Legend of Tarzan, his character takes on his human name, John Clayton III, aka Lord Greystoke, and lives in England with wife Jane Porter, played by The Wolf of Wall Street's Margot Robbie, 25. He is invited to travel to the Congo as a British trade emissary, unaware of a sinister plan spearheaded by the Belgian Captain Léon Rom, played by Austrian star Christoph Waltz, 59, who often plays villains in movies.
Samuel L. Jackson, 67, plays George Washington Williams, an American civil war veteran, politician and historian who traveled to the Congo and wrote articles about he treatment of the natives under Belgian rule.
The Legend of Tarzan is set for release on July 1.