Alexander Skarsgård was “pretty gutted” when all of his scenes were cut from the 2005 romantic comedy Hitch.

After scoring his first U.S. film role in 2001’s Zoolander, the Swedish actor struggled to find work for several years before found fame with the 2008 TV shows Generation Kill and True Blood.

During those tough years, Skarsgård was thrilled when he landed a role alongside Will Smith, Kevin James and Amber Valletta in Hitch. However, he later learned that his work had been reduced to a photo in a newspaper.

“I was playing Amber Valletta’s character’s douchebag ex-boyfriend. I was over the moon, because it was a big movie. I hadn’t worked in a couple years, and then I got that job, and I was like, ‘I’m in a f**king Will Smith movie, this is amazing,’ and it was a fun character,” he recalled in an interview with Empire magazine.

“I did a couple of weeks on that, and then my entire storyline got cut out of the movie, and all that’s left is a black and white photo in a newspaper where they refer to her ex-boyfriend. So I was pretty gutted.”

The Northman star noted that he wasn’t too surprised because his character Sebastian appeared in “a subplot of a subplot” and he thought, “If they’re gonna cut something out of this movie, this character is probably gonna go.”

In a 2019 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Hitch director Andy Tennant revealed that Skarsgård, Smith, James and Valletta filmed a sequence at Madison Square Garden during a basketball game. While the game still made the cut, he felt that Sebastian was not necessary.

“The sequence was about trying to convince the audience that Kevin’s character was the most-worthy of (Valletta’s character’s) love,” he explained. “And we just didn’t need it. People loved Kevin James from the first scene.”

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