Before he became the sultry, swaggering vampire that makes the ladies swoon on True Blood, Alexander Skarsgard’s Eric Northman was a Viking. So it somehow makes sense that he should be more than ready to play another of the warriors in a new film called The Vanguard.

Right now, that’s just the working title for the adventure that Warner Bros. is buying. Most of the story is being kept a tightly guarded secret (rumour has it, two giant blokes with battle axes are standing outside the vault where the paper with the full plot is stored), but Variety was able to ferret out that Skarsgard would be one of two Viking brothers exiled to America who begin a quest to make it back to Sweden.

And it’s a big day for playwright Chris Boal, who is also behind a script pitch about Julius Caesar that Battle: Los Angeles Jonathan Liebesman is now attached to direct.

Warners apparently thinks this could end up as something along the lines of Braveheart or Gladiator, though it remains to be seen if it makes it through the rough seas of development.

Skarsgard is getting plenty of work at the moment, at least: in addition to True Blood, he has big screen roles in Straw Dogs and Battleship set to arrive in the next couple of years, and scored a part in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which premiered at Cannes. He's come a long way since Zoolander, eh?