First Look: Alexander Skarsgard's New Tarzan Is Insanely Ripped

That jungle work out regime is clearly working out for Alexander Skarsgard.

Here we have a first look at cinema’s newest Tarzan and Jane (played by Margot Robbie) from ‘The Legend of Tarzan’, currently being made by Harry Potter helmsman David Yates.

The action-adventure is based – loosely – on Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic novels, but unlike other adaptations, Tarzan won’t be played as the wild man raised by animals and discovered in the jungle.

'True Blood’ star Skarsgard – son of Swedish acting legend Stellan – plays John Clayton III, Lord Greystoke, living as a member of the gentry in 19th century Victorian London, a decade after leaving the Congo.

He is now married to Jane, but does experience flashbacks to his time being raised by apes.

Greystoke is then dragged back to the Congo as 'an emissary of parliament’, and finds that his old skills come in extremely handy as the couple find themselves in perilous danger.

Starring alongside Robbie and Skarsgard are Djimon Hounsou as a Congolese tribal chief, Samuel L. Jackson as adventurer George Washington Williams and Christoph Waltz as the movie’s villain, the Belgian Captain Leon Rom.

The plot has a basis in the history of Belgian King Leopold II, who conquered and colonised the Congo in the 1880s, and was responsible for horrifying mass genocide.

Yates told USA Today: “It’s almost the opposite of the classic tale, where it’s about taming the beast. This is about a man who’s holding back and slowly as you peel off the layers, he reverts back to a more animalistic state and lets that side of his personality out.

“He has this wonderful quality of not quite belonging to one or the other [country]. Tarzan needs muscles, but it’s more a leaner, longer, more vertical modern man than the square-jawed stereotype we’re used to.”

Of Robbie’s Jane, he added: “[She’s] in no way a passive partner to Tarzan. She’s a really strong, assertive, beautifully knowledgeable, very sexy modern woman who can more than look after herself. In a way, it’s a story of two human beings and how they save each other.”

The movie is due out on July 8, 2016.

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Image credits: Warner Bros