Alicia Vikander at the 2022 Cannes film festival. Photo / Getty Images
Her Oscar for The Danish Girl changed her life — but it wasn't all first-class flights and five-star hotels. The actress talks miscarriage, juggling childcare with Michael Fassbender and her new show, Irma Vep.
Alicia Vikander has just finished making a film called Firebrand, playing Catherine Parr, in which she had to rest her head on Jude Law's prosthetic thigh. "Jude wore a fake leg over his real one," the Swedish star explains — he's skinny, Henry VIII was fat. "It freaked me out. The thigh had really good hair. They told me it was from some animal."
She tells the story to illustrate how far prosthetics have come, but, really, it just shows what a strange profession acting is. You spend half your life pretending to be someone else, speaking someone else's words — occasionally resting your cheek on a famous thigh. And if you're any good at it, soon you can't leave your palatial home without a big hat or sunglasses for disguise.
Vikander's life changed permanently after her Oscar win for the transgender romance The Danish Girl and her role in Alex Garland's sci-fi thriller Ex Machina. Yet spend an hour with her, and you get a memorable peek behind the celebrity circus curtain.
There is a trend for this, from Carrie Fisher's unvarnished Hollywood home truths, to Minnie Driver's recent memoir, Managing Expectations, in which she details being told to fake orgasms for a chocolate advert. ("I need you to do it twice. Once normally, then make the second one bigger, for the Netherlands market.") Television and film are looking afresh at the real lives of famous screen stars. I Hate Suzie has Billie Piper as an actress in trouble. Call My Agent! has a lot of actors, all in trouble.
Vikander, 33, is the latest actor to play an actor. Irma Vep is a compelling new HBO series by the French director Olivier Assayas, a remake of his 1996 film about a French auteur remaking a silent film with a foreign actress. Vikander plays Mira, making arthouse after a career of US blockbusters. This is all incredibly French, but also very funny and surprisingly accessible.
In my favourite bit, an actor talks about a sci-fi movie he is shooting that is being touted as the new Blade Runner, but without any rain because market research told the producers that audiences these days are not into rain.
I meet Vikander, who is dressed smart-casual, early one sunny morning for coffee and croissants outside a Lisbon cafe. She lives in the city with her actor husband, Michael Fassbender, and their 17-month-old son.
She is relaxed and dryly funny, chatting to other customers and rolling her eyes when a drill drowns out our chit-chat. The couple moved from London four years ago. "I have my tiny family with me and that becomes home wherever you are," she says, smiling.
She started filming Irma Vep in Paris when their baby was 3 months old. Like most of us, she's trying to find a work/life balance. "We do every second job," she says of how she and Fassbender ensure that there is always one parent around. "One stays at home while the other works." How did she feel about going back to work so soon? "Excited, but it was intense. Sometimes they came to the set just so he could see my face."
Vikander knows that she is lucky to be able to pick and choose work, but she also reveals that a lot can be going on in actors' lives that fans simply do not know about — especially in an industry that demands that its celebrities on parade always appear to be happy. Irma Vep tackles this head-on — one of its stories is of a pop star who suffers a miscarriage, but is told to perform that very night. The subject hit Vikander hard because miscarriage is a loss she has suffered too. "We have a child now, but it took us time," she confides.
Vikander met her husband seven years ago while filming The Light Between Oceans, a sweeping melodrama in which her character suffers two miscarriages. "Talk about meta," she says with a nervous laugh.
Yet can films on tough topics help viewer and performer to deal with their trauma? "Totally. [The miscarriage] was so extreme, painful to go through and, of course, it made me recall making that film." She stops. "That film has another meaning now."
Vikander says that the double life of stars — the public adulation, the private problems — is a reality for many in the public eye. "Sometimes you go through things that are tough in life and if you have an office job you can step away for a bit. But there are times that myself or colleagues have been through something and, well, I can't understand how they went on to the red carpet afterwards. To be met by people asking, 'How are you doing?' Given what they had just been through? Most people would not be able to step out of their house."
When Vikander was in her early 20s she was stuck on a shoot in Canada, wondering if being a globetrotting A-lister was all it was cracked up to be. She was making a fantasy film, Seventh Son, and it was the first time she had spent months away from Sweden and her mother, an actress, and father, a psychiatrist. She was in a plush hotel all alone. She missed her mates.
"It was very lonely," she explains. "If I didn't have my friends to call, it would have been difficult. I've seen what can happen to people in my industry."
Then came more time away, playing a rush of high-profile roles, most memorably her android in Ex Machina. An Oscar in 2016 for The Danish Girl capped that period and, to outsiders, Vikander was clearly living her best life.
"But there was juxtaposition," she says. "When, in other people's eyes, I was at my height of fame, I was the most sad. I kept telling myself, 'Take it in. It is incredible.' But I didn't know what to do. There were all these first-class flights, five-star rooms. But I was always by myself. I was by myself."
Yes, okay. Break out the tiny violin. Who cares about the woes of the global celebrity elite? Yet Vikander is not complaining; she is too self-aware. She is just discussing her industry, in which the young and vulnerable can be treated like cattle. As Ian Winwood's recent book Bodies — about an absence of care in the music industry — reveals, death rates for young musicians are twice those for the general population. Film is not as bad. But it is not good.
Yet Vikander acknowledges that much of an actor's life can still be gloriously ridiculous. In Irma Vep Mira faces a round table of journalists desperate for a headline, while promoting a film in which her character chops the testicles off her nemesis. One hack asks if it "struck a nerve because of present-day politics in Europe?"
"I have been on round tables where everyone wanted to talk seriously about my favourite colour," Vikander says with a sigh. That was for Tomb Raider, her 2018 Lara Croft remake, which was accompanied by a carnival of press and premieres. Yet she loved being on a movie that big. She was older, more in control of her career and already a producer with her company, Vikarious.
"I should have been a bit more prepped," she says about the early days when she started out. It makes me think of a review in Entertainment Weekly of Carrie Fisher's The Princess Diarist, a collection of reflections she made when she played Leia in Star Wars. "There isn't insight into [Star Wars]," it reads. "But tremendous insight into the volatile heart of a young woman seen through the eyes of her older self."
Years ago, Vikander said she would read her interviews and see herself on screen, but not recognise herself. She was young and awkward. Others were creating a narrative about her that was not true. "It felt like another person." But now that she is older, she has reconciled the public and private versions of Alicia and who she is. She smiles. "It was me."
Irma Vep is available to stream on Neon.
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London
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