During his long tenure at Sweden's Royal National Theatre, Stormare acted in productions of "Don Juan," "Cyrano de Bergerac" and "The Curse of the Starving Class" and wrote and directed "El Paso" and "The Electric Boy". When the company mounted a Bergman-directed "Hamlet" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1988, Stormare won raves in the title role. On the company's world tours, the actor also played in "Long Day's Journey Into Night", "King Lear" and "Miss Julie".

Stormare made his feature film debut for Bergman with a bit role in "Fanny and Alexander" (1983). He had his first lead playing the older brother trying to save his younger brother from a life of crime in "Der Frusna Leoparden/The Frozen Leopard" (1986). Stormare was the beekeeper in "Malaprirater" (1987) and made his American film debut as the neurochemist who doubts Robin Williams in Penny Marshall's "Awakenings" (1990). Stormare also co-starred in Louis Malle's "Damage" (1992) before settling in the USA. In 1993, he appeared in "The Swan" at NYC's Public Theatre opposite leading lady Frances McDormand, who is married to Joel Coen. Two years later, when the Coen brothers were casting "Fargo", Stormare landed his breakthrough role. In 1997, he played one of the dinosaur hunters in Steven Spielberg's "The Lost World: Jurassic Park", supported David Duchovny and Timothy Hutton in "Playing God" and reunited with the Coens for "The Big Lebowski".

What followed was a string of roles in which Stormare brought his distinctive sly humor to an array of usually eccentric supporting characters in a long string of films, most notably "Armageddon" (1998), "8MM" (1999), "Chocolat" (2000), "The Million Dollar Hotel" (2000), "Dancer in the Dark" (2000), "Windtalkers" (2002), "Minority Report" (2002), "Spun" (2002), "Bad Boys II" (2003) and "Birth" (2004). He appeared as Ingvar in the experimental Julia Louis-Dreyfus sitcom "Watching Ellie" (NBC, 2002-2003), and Stormare was especially amusing playing a loopy but still fearsome Satan in a pivotal appearance in the third act of horror/action hybrid "Constantine" opposite Keanu Reeves. Another off-kilter, heavily accented performance, as the bewigged Italian Cavaldi in diector Terry Gilliam's fictionalized fantasy "The Brothers Grimm" (2005), started out with great comedic (even Pythonesque) promise but quickly grew wearisome when the director became overreliant on Stormare's outrageous performance for comic relief. The actor then joined the cast of the TV death row thriller "Prison Break" (Fox, 2005 - ) as imprisoned former mob boss John Abruzzi.