The Rolling Stones give Alexander Skarsgård the gigolo role in their Mr Charm video

The Rolling Stones have turned Mr Charm, the song in which Mick Jagger plays a smooth-talking chancer chasing a rich woman’s money, into their latest single, and they have handed the part to Alexander Skarsgård. In the video, directed by Henry Scholfield, the Swedish actor struts half-dressed into a small-town desert diner and charms everyone inside into a frenzy, as Consequence describes it.

The casting says a lot about how the band is selling this record. Mr Charm is the third single from Foreign Tongues, their 25th British studio album, and the third in a row built around a screen star rather than the band itself. Anya Taylor-Joy and Charles Melton carried Jealous Lover, and Odessa A’zion fronted In the Stars. For a group whose frontman is 83, lending the seducer’s role to a younger actor is a joke the song already makes about itself.

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Jagger has described the track as four on the floor and danceable, and he showed it over the summer with an Instagram clip of himself dancing to it in a club. Rolling Stone’s Kory Grow read it as a playful gigolo number in which Jagger tells a wealthy lover, “Life’s too short for just making money / Show me how to spend it, honey.” Grow also caught a rare admission of age: the narrator once dreamed of roving Mars and now prefers to stay home to “do anagrams, spew epigrams.”

There is one sharper line under the flirting. Jagger calls the world’s first trillionaire “mad mogul Mr. Musk,” a jab that the Guardian’s Dave Simpson singled out in his review of the album. It fits a record on which Jagger takes several shots at the very rich, from billionaires fleeing to “bolt holes in the sky” to the money his own Mr Charm wants to spend.

For longtime fans, the B-side may matter more. Bad Luck Hideaway, a duet between Jagger and Keith Richards that had only been sold as an iTunes bonus track, reaches streaming services for the first time with this single. It carries drums Charlie Watts recorded during sessions at British Grove, and producer Andrew Watt, who also made Hackney Diamonds with the band, oversaw it.

None of this settles what Foreign Tongues is, and the reviews remain split. The Times gave the album five stars and called it a career high, while Paste graded it D+ and argued that the production sands down the edges and defangs the band’s guitar solos. A third single from an album already months into its run works more as a catalogue push than as a new statement, and the star casting pulls attention toward the video rather than the song. Fans in every market also face a practical gap, because no Foreign Tongues tour dates exist anywhere yet.

Foreign Tongues came out on July 10, 2026 through Polydor, less than three years after Hackney Diamonds, which won the Grammy for best rock album. It entered the UK chart at No. 1 with 38,016 copies in its first week, reached No. 7 on the Billboard 200 with 54,000 album-equivalent units and topped the charts in 14 countries. The Mr Charm single, backed with Bad Luck Hideaway, reached streaming services on October 1, 2026 alongside the video, which was shot in Palmdale, California. Jagger has said he wants to take the new songs on the road in 2027, and Richards has hinted at the same, but the band has yet to announce a single date.

Tags: rock, Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones, Alexander Skarsgård, Foreign Tongues, Mr Charm

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