The Australian weaving magic with sexy basket movie Wicker

When the trailer dropped for darkly comic fable Wicker, the image of Olivia Colman's fisherwoman in post-coital bliss with Alexander Skarsgård's strawman sent the internet into a frenzy.

So much so that distributors Roadshow pulled its release date forward to please the people.

"It's so funny, because when the internet reaction happened, there was a parallel there to how the villagers behave," says Australian Eleanor Wilson, who co-directed the film with her partner in life and cinema, Alex Huston Fischer.

"There are some people who are horrified by it, like, 'No thank you,' and others who are really horny for it."

The Colman factor

Filmed in rural Hungary, Wicker is a fairy tale-like story in which characters go by their job titles rather than individual names.

Colman plays a fisherwoman who is looked down on by the villagers to whom she sells her wares because of her whiff. Especially by the snooty tailor's wife: Australian actor Elizabeth Debicki.

While the fisherwoman has no interest in the latter's tradwife tendencies — initially refusing to be drawn into a marriage ceremony which pairs off the villagers — the meanness of Debicki's character changes her mind.

She trots round to Peter Dinklage's basket weaver with a handful of coins, asking him to thatch her a buff basket husband (Alexander Skarsgård).

"Olivia made it believable," Wilson says.

"The fisherwoman doesn't care what other people think, but she's also not impervious to being influenced, letting that stuff creep into her.

"Olivia understood that on a gut level and went with it wholeheartedly and instinctively."

Wilson's still pinching herself Colman signed on, given this is only her and Fischer's second feature, following their 2020 low-key alien invasion relationship drama, Save Yourselves!

"She's happy to read a script and take a risk," Wilson says.

Once Colman signed on, the cast blossomed, including Nabhaan Rizwan as the tailor and Richard E Grant as a wildly unprofessional doctor.

"When Olivia's in, everyone wants to be involved, both cast and crew," Wilson says. "She's a magnet for talent."

Crafty people

The willingness to go far out includes the always game Skarsgård.

"We were just so lucky that Alexander's the kind of actor who likes to get weird," Fischer says. "He had just done Pillion right before he came to shoot this, and it's an interesting double feature."

The woven suit worn by Skarsgård was designed by Wētā Workshop, the Kiwi wizards behind Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies. They worked hand-in-glove with costume designers Tóth András Dániel and Godena-Juhász Attila, prosthetics guru Joe Dunckley and makeup artist Sarah Rubano to get the look right.

Skarsgård was up for the punishing physical challenge, with the weave taking a minimum of 90 minutes to apply, to be worn for up to eight hours at a time.

"He was sweating profusely," Fischer reveals of the ordeal. "We couldn't have him in direct sunlight."

Skarsgård's Swedish stoicism helped him pull off the demanding character.

"To be able to project the beautiful, subtle performance that he did through this prosthetic was very challenging," Wilson says.

"He had to really exaggerate his facial movements to be able to get the movement across. The work that he's doing underneath that is a completely different style of acting to how one would normally behave in a film."

Sound designer Andy Neil's work helped bring the wicker man to life. 

"He achieved the perfectly calibrated creak," Wilson says.

While The Brutalist cinematographer Lol Crawley helped Wicker shine visually.

"He's been such a cheerleader for the film and in mentoring us," Fischer says. 

"When he first arrived, we said we wanted to make a comedy that looks like a 17th-century Dutch painting, and he didn't even bat an eyelid."

Eagle-eyed trailer viewers zoomed right in on a momentary flash of the wicker husband's woven wotsit in a stunning scene in which he's waist deep, naked in a river. 

But for Fischer is was just a lovely first day of shooting.

"Seeing how the weave patterns interact, how the anatomy comes together, with Lol shooting with the backlight, we were walking on air and couldn't believe how lucky we were," Fisher says.

"There's a lot about this movie that was an impossible technical challenge achieved by these incredible craftspeople."

Hedgehog grease

In getting the village's fraught dynamic right, Wilson was determined to cast Debicki in the pricklier role of the tailor's wife.

"Elizabeth understood she's not there to be a foil to Olivia's character," Wilson says. "She's her own person with a hell of a lot going on, the whole burden of this society on her, and that her position in life isn't really fair."

While Skarsgård was perspiring, Debicki faced her own physical challenges.

"Women worked with their hands so much in those days, and they would break down because they were in water all the time," Fischer says.

A fate faced by Debicki and others on set, but the filmmakers deployed a period-appropriate solution.

"It's gross, but we used hedgehog grease," Wilson says of the old folk medicine that uses literal Erinaceinae fat.

The original trailer which broke the internet really has greased the wheels in rolling out Wicker to the masses, Wilson says.

"We feel very lucky to be putting out a movie in 2026, because it does seem like an incredible year for wild swings," she says.

Fischer agrees. "Studios have been afraid of it for a long time, because they just assume everybody's a quote unquote normal person. But people are hungry for it. They're freaks."

And Colman was freakishly good, according to the pair. 

"That feels like the magic trick of the movie," Wilson insists. "There's obviously a lot of other stuff going on, but if you don't care about the fisherwoman, what do you care about?"