It’s unintentional, mind you, but Alicia Vikander does the Luckiest Girl Alive thing effortlessly. Even doing an interview by Skype—her preferred mode of communication with far-flung friends these days—can’t conceal it. It’s 10 A.M. in Sydney, Australia, and she’s puttering around the house of her boyfriend, actor Michael Fassbender. (He’s decamped there to shoot Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. She’s on a two-week holiday between film sets.) Her hair has that just-out-of-the-shower look. She’s wearing a light-blue button-down shirt that, even if it isn’t her boyfriend’s, looks like it should be. She’s making the kind of breakfast that elegant, health-conscious European women eat: a mix of muesli and yogurt, accompanied by a beverage of fresh-squeezed lemon juice mixed with apple-cider vinegar that some holistic-minded Australian friends are crazy about. “It’s apparently very good for you, but it’s disgusting!” says Vikander. Unlike the typical person, whose face over Skype looks as if he or she were staring into a doorknob, Vikander looks as exquisite and glowing as ever.
This past year has been her year, as they say—the 27-year-old Swedish actress, who now lives in London, shot from relative obscurity to international superstardom with four major films in just 12 months—Testament of Youth, Ex Machina, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and The Danish Girl—the kind of feat that Jessica Chastain accomplished a couple of years ago. Vikander was the “It girl” of this past awards season, earning a best-actress Golden Globe nomination for her role as an intensely alluring robot in Ex Machina and winning the Oscar for best supporting actress in The Danish Girl, as Gerda Wegener, the wild and determined wife of one of the earliest men to undergo gender-confirmation surgery, played by Eddie Redmayne. She’s both a muse to modern fashion designers—a year ago she became the new face of Louis Vuitton—and a dream for costume designers doing lush period dramas. No one has worn romantic, charming period frocks with such conviction since Helena Bonham Carter, as Lucy Honeychurch, frolicked in the grass in A Room with a View.
Now the world is at her feet, and she’s picking out projects according to nothing but whim and personal passion. A pair of guilty-pleasure blockbusters? Check. She’s currently in Jason Bourne, opposite Matt Damon, and she’s gearing up to play Lara Croft in the next Tomb Raider movie. A venture with an iconic European director? Another check: Wim Wenders’s Submergence, opposite James McAvoy, which she’s just wrapped. An indie with an old friend? She got that too: Euphoria, directed by Lisa Langseth, the woman who discovered her. It also happens to be the first title from her film company, Vikarious Productions, which she started, well, in order to do exactly what she wants.
But first, there’s the Oscar-bait film with movie-star boyfriend: The Light Between Oceans, out in September, about a lighthouse keeper and his wife, who, grieving from two recent miscarriages, discover a baby who washes ashore in a rowboat and make the disastrous decision to raise her as their own. Directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, A Place Beyond the Pines), it’s the kind of wrenching adult melodrama that Hollywood rarely makes these days, because it’s hard to pull off successfully—although they got this one right. It’s also where she and Fassbender fell in love. All of it is so absurdly charmed, and Vikander is still wrapping her head around it. “Hollywood was like a rumor,” she says, musing on how far she’s come. “I and my mum, we’d set the alarm to two A.M. to watch the Oscars, and it was like a window onto another universe. And then to have her there next to me [at the Oscars] this year. We were just cursing in Swedish. . . . It’s been pretty ****ing . . . Wow.”
To those who’ve worked with her, Vikander is such a rare force of nature that the only way she could have remained in Swedish obscurity would have been if she’d made a concerted effort to do so. Co-stars and past directors tell a similar story—one that begins with instant enchantment by some kind of ineffable star quality. “I was just beguiled by her!” says Joe Wright, director of Anna Karenina—a reaction that’s rather typical from her collaborators. Their admiration deepens as they witness Vikander’s perfectionist tenacity, born from years of ballet training. “In dance, you do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again, until you get it right,” says Redmayne. “The pain of ballet to get to the beauty. She brings that absolute rigor and absolute desire to give the very best.” Finally, and most powerfully, it’s about the emotional passion that she unleashes in a scene, all the more disarming due to her physical pristineness. As Redmayne puts in, “There’s this other thing that has nothing to do with her technical brilliance. A kind of deep emotion and capacity to feel that is volcanic.”
These two forces—rigorous determination and devil-may-care abandon—seem to be roiling about inside her. Which adds up to someone who’s more down to earth than she appears. True, she possesses a physical poise in pictures and on-screen that can be distancing or make her seem prissy or haughty. And yet in real life she has a big laugh and is surprisingly chatty—even a bit rambling. One might be interested to learn that she’s not afraid to tell a story with her mouth full of yogurt and that she carries around the retro dice game Yahtzee in her handbag. She’s private about her romance with Michael Fassbender, yet she’s been known to have a girlish enthusiasm for sharing naughty tidbits. “You might not think you can tease her, but she kind of likes to be teased,” says Wright. He recalls of their time making Anna Karenina, “She had a new boyfriend at the time, and she’d come in rather sloshed on Monday mornings. She had a little chafing on her chin from all the kissing she’d been doing on the weekend. I’d tease her about that. And I’d tease her about being a perfectionist as well. I really appreciate and admire her perfectionism, but it’s important that we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
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http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/alicia-vikander-cover-story
