Alicia Vikander opens up about family, fame, and her road to becoming Scandinavia's biggest star

On a brick-lain dead end street in an unsexy neighbourhood in Paris, several people clad mostly in black are arranged in some sort of huddle. Hushed voices punctuated by little spurts of hairspray emanate from the pack. One man holds an umbrella, despite the fact that there is a cloud blocking the mid-morning sun.

“It’s moving,” someone shouts. Everyone looks towards the sky, watching the cloud pass. All at once the block is flooded with sunlight and the group disperses to reveal Alicia Vikander. She wears a drop-waisted Victorian Louis Vuitton dress, its exaggerated hips only accentuating her tiny frame. With every movement – slight and precise – the light shimmers across the embellished bodice. She looks like, well, like a movie star shooting the cover of Vogue.

Later, over video call, I ask Vikander if she would classify participating in a fashion shoot as acting. She considers the question for a moment, then states rather definitively: “No.” “When I was a child, I liked being in front of a moving camera, you know? I felt natural and I wanted to express myself in front of it,” she says. “Then you get to a photoshoot and it’s not the same... ease.”

Vikander is sitting in a decadent room at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles – the same hotel once frequented by Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn. The actress, who was born in Gothenburg, appears on my screen the epitome of nonchalant Swedish beauty – hair pulled back in a ponytail, a braid down one side of her part. Not a stitch of makeup. She speaks in charming anecdotes that seem to come easily. In fact, it’s hard to imagine Vikander ever feeling not at ease.

There was at least one photoshoot for which Vikander was unmistakably acting. In the first episode of the upcoming HBO Max series Irma Vep, out June 6, Vikander stars in a Vogue editorial... or rather, her character, Mira, an American actress in Paris, does. Promoting a fictional blockbuster sci-fi film, Vikander, as Mira, appears in a white spacesuit, holding a prop space gun, posing with gusto as the photographer snaps away. Spacesuit aside, the scene was not unlike our own Paris-set, Alicia Vikander-starring cover shoot.

It is a meta moment in an outrageously meta project. The show is a remake of a 1996 film of the same name, which follows an American actress starring in an adaptation of the real-life French silent film Les Vampires. Still with me? Both versions of Irma Vep are written and directed by Parisian auteur Olivier Assayas.

Vikander tells me she’s in LA doing ADR (in which an actor records additional audio) for the project while her husband, the actor Michael Fassbender, finishes up a shoot of his own. “It’s the first time I do a proper American accent, so I kind of want to perfect things,” she says. It isn’t entirely true – she recently pulled off a Southern twang in indie drama Blue Bayou – but this is her first West Coast American accent. Usually, Vikander plays British. “Sometimes I just wish that English was my native language,” she says with a chuckle. “If I would prep something in Swedish, I would probably do a tenth of the actual work in hours.”

The role of Mira was offered to Vikander by Assayas directly. The two met in a manner that’s totally showbiz. The director was prepping for his 2016 supernatural fashion thriller Personal Shopper when his star, Kristen Stewart, suddenly faced scheduling issues. “Alicia was the next name on my list,” Assayas tells me over FaceTime. He’s sitting in Paris, finishing up editing Irma Vep. “We met and we instantly connected. I just loved her – we spoke the same language. She’s both an American actress and a European actress, so she has both cultures, and she’s so incredibly intense and dedicated.”

Stewart ultimately became available – Assayas took home Best Director at Cannes for the film – but he and Vikander remained friends over the years. When the director decided to remake Irma Vep, Vikander was the “obvious choice” to play the lead. “She’s the opposite of a superficial person,” he says. “She has a very profound relationship to filmmaking, to acting, but at the same time she has something that is childlike and innocent.”

Strangely enough, it was not the first time Vikander had lost a role to Stewart. When she was initially trying to break into the American film market, Vikander made a marathon of self tapes. “This was in the beginning of when you could use a video camera and record, and then plug it into a computer, upload it for a few hours, send it via a link and then you broke the link and had to start again,” she says. “Back then, I did about 20 self tapes through my Swedish agent, in English, and I never heard anything back. I didn’t even get no’s.” She began to wonder if anyone was even watching.

Meanwhile, more and more American films were holding auditions in London. So Vikander called up her agent and said, “Can’t I just go to London instead?” She figured that way, at least they’d have the chance to say no to her face.

When the opportunity arose to audition for Snow White and the Huntsman, her bag was essentially packed. Just one problem: 300 actresses were invited to do self tapes and after that, only about 30 were going to make it into the room to audition in person. The casting director had mentioned to Vikander’s agent that “if Alicia is ever in London, she can have a general meeting with me and a coffee.” “Three days later I call my agent and I’m like, ‘I’m in London helping a friend who’s here for a music... thing,’” Vikander says. She had booked a Ryanair flight and a two-star hotel.

At 10.15 the following morning, Vikander got 45 minutes with the casting director. “I walked in and I was like, ‘Hello,’ and she’s like ‘Do you have any makeup? Can you let your hair down?’” Vikander says, laughing. Perhaps the casting director had never auditioned a Swede before. Two days later, Vikander was sitting in a London Starbucks when she got a phone call. “I think the people next to me thought my boyfriend called and broke up with me,” she says, mimicking an outrageous sob. She and two other actresses were to be flown out to Los Angeles to do a screen test. Vikander had never been to the United States.

Stewart ultimately got the role of Snow White. “I remember I was like, ‘Kristen Stewart?!’ Clearly I’m not going to be able to get the part,” says Vikander. “I was just, like, fanning out over the fact that I was casting for a role that she got.” Within 12 hours of her screen test, Vikander started receiving phone calls from American agents hoping to sign her.

Things happened quite quickly for the actress after that. The same year that Snow White and the Huntsman was met with tepid reviews, Danish period drama A Royal Affair, which starred Vikander opposite Mads Mikkelsen, was nominated for an Oscar. “It felt like a once in a lifetime chance to be there,” says Vikander (she would win Best Actress for The Danish Girl just three years later).

It was her first American red carpet and she didn’t have a stylist, but true to form she had a plan. “I grew up loving Elie Saab dresses,” she says. “It was like, if I get married or go to a ball one day, I’d have an Elie Saab dress. So I called them. I was in Paris and I was like, ‘Hi, I’m going to the Oscars. I love your dresses, I love you guys.’” They invited her to their press office where they served her Champagne and lent her a look.

Today you can make the argument rather effortlessly that Vikander is Scandinavia’s biggest movie star. Not only is she the first actor from the region to take home an Oscar since Ingrid Bergman’s third and final win in 1974, she carries both prestige period dramas and action-packed blockbusters – notably Tomb Raider – with panache. Still, she hardly leads a movie star life. Vikander, Fassbender and their child, whom they welcomed nearly a year ago, reside in Lisbon, far from the industry-led socialising of Hollywood, New York or London. There, they live largely unbothered by the paparazzi.

Unsurprisingly however, the tabloids have been obsessed with the couple ever since they got together on the set of The Light Between Oceans. I ask Vikander if she can recall her first paparazzi encounter. “I think it was the first time when I met my husband – obviously he already had a high ‘status’ – and we were in Sydney. Sydney is, I would still say, the most dangerous place where I’ve come across paparazzi,” she says. “They’ve driven cars over pedestrian streets to cross you – they’re a bit crazy.” Add to that two superstars engaging in a budding romance and you’ve got yourself a feeding frenzy.

“I remember we had a coffee, it was just when we had met and made a film together,” Vikander says. “And I thought he was so kind of... Like, what is up with this guy? He suddenly got all quiet and was like, ‘I’m being photographed.’ Like... What? And two days later we had photos – the lens must have been on the other side of I don’t know where.” Over time, Vikander has developed a paparazzi spidey sense as well. She describes moments out with friends when she’ll go “kind of stiff” just as Fassbender did over coffee Down Under.

In keeping with her low-key lifestyle, Vikander doesn’t have Instagram, though she describes her social media absence as more of a preference than an active choice. She had an account briefly, back before there would be tabloid interest in her posts, but she was “stressed even having, like, 70 friends.” “I thought, oh, this is too much work,” she says. Instead she communicates with pals – some of whom are well-known Swedes like Tove Lo and Icona Pop – via voice note and emoji-filled text messages. Her most frequent emoji is the thumbs up and she’s recently introduced the sweaty smiley.

Though Vikander used to work at a prolific rate, sometimes filming four projects in a year, motherhood has altered her pace, especially given that she and her husband are both in-demand actors. “We try to do every second job if it takes us to different places,” she says, noting that it “worked for this year.”

“That means that one parent is always with the baby and we travel as a family.” It has caused her to choose her projects with more care, placing a greater emphasis on the directors and actors she works with. “I might do two a year, because the rest of the time I obviously want to be with my child,” she says.

Growing up in Gothenburg, Vikander knew at a very young age that she wanted to perform. Her first dream was ballet. “I went and saw The Nutcracker when I was three,” she says. “My mom was so surprised – she thought I was going to be in there for 15 minutes, and I saw the whole two acts.” By the time she was five she “wanted to do ballet and have a pretty dress.” Unfortunately, for her first on-stage performance, it wasn’t meant to be. “The other group my age got to be butterflies and princesses, and I got to be a baker,” she says, in a mock-whine.

Despite the disappointing sartorial start, ballet stuck. Vikander trained first with Svenska Balettskolan in Gothenburg for six years and then at the Royal Swedish Ballet School in Stockholm before quitting to focus on acting full time.

To excel on screen, one might think Vikander would have to unlearn some of that poise synonymous with ballet. However, it’s that precise physical control that gives Vikander her edge. “I am aware of looseness as well. What a ballet training can do is [give you] an extreme, to-the-bone awareness of your body. I’m using it now,” she says, panning her camera down to reveal her legs tucked up under her in one of those awkward-casual poses. “I’m aware of what message this brings.” Suddenly I wonder what else has been considered – the way she sometimes rests her chin in her hand, for instance.

Vikander’s physical control is something Assayas comments on in our conversation as well. “She’s a dancer,” he says. “She has an experience in choreography that she uses in every single shot – in her way of moving, in her way of interacting with the camera.” This plays out pointedly in Irma Vep when Vikander first tries on the character’s iconic catsuit – a skin tight one-piece not unlike the Balenciaga look worn by Kim Kardashian to last year’s Met Gala. This time around, the costume is designed by Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s creative director (Vikander has been an ambassador for the house since 2015).

When Vikander slips into the suit, she begins to explore the set, feline-like, in control of every dip and stretch. While she may not be totally at ease on a fashion shoot, clothes do play a large part in Vikander’s work. She describes the moment of trying on a costume for a character as “one of the first times on any new project where I really get a sense of, ‘Oh, so this is what I’m going to do.’” “There’s a bit of magic to it,” she says. When she first put on the catsuit, she felt as though “Alicia was erased completely.”

About once a year, Vikander returns to Sweden. She’ll spend a few days in Gothenburg, visiting her mum (Vikander’s parents separated shortly after she was born. Her dad now lives close to Borås), before heading to Stockholm to catch up with friends. “I moved when I was 15, so all of my friends are in Stockholm,” she says. There, she might take a stroll around Djurgården, visit a museum or two, but really the visits home are all about the food. “If I’m there for a week I go through köttbullar, skagen, sill...” she says, listing off all the classics. “I kind of do a whole week.”

There is one place in Gothenburg that has a special place in her heart: the amusement park Liseberg. “Beats Gröna Lund any day,” she says, referring to the competing park in Stockholm. “When they got to a certain age, I was able to bring my niece and nephew. My husband and I took them.” She notes that she and Fassbender had just as much fun as the children.

When she was a child, Vikander dreamed of going to Disneyland. “Sorry Dad, I’m going to out you,” she says, by way of prefacing the following. “He even said that, ‘Next year we are going to go,' and we never did. You know how much damage that can do?” She laughs. It’s been decades – lifetimes – since her father committed the cardinal parental sin of promising a child a trip to ‘the happiest place on earth’ and failing to deliver. Vikander has since populated an entire IMDb page, fulfilled all sorts of unfulfillable dreams, and she’s still never been to Disneyland. But she’s looking forward to realising that dream, too. “Now I have my child as a chaperone.”