Alicia Vikander: Everything you need to know about the Bafta nominee

She's dating Michael Fassbender, lives in North London and this Sunday Alicia Vikander is in the running for two Baftas. Rosamund Urwin swoons over a new scene-stealing star
On the carpet: Alicia Vikander is in the running for two Baftas
Rex
Rosamund Urwin12 February 2016
The Weekender

Sign up to our free weekly newsletter for exclusive competitions, offers and theatre ticket deals

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

We're all going to need a lesson in how to pronounce “Alicia Vikander”. The actress, who’s up for an Academy Award for The Danish Girl, was the break-out star of 2015, yet everyone’s been saying her name wrong.

Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel this week, she explained the correct, Swedish pronunciation of her surname (more like “Vickanndarrr”). As Kimmel joked: “If John Travolta has to introduce your category, God help him, it’s gonna be a disaster.”

Vikander’s fanbase is ballooning. She’s won rave reviews from the critics. She’s the fashion world’s new style crush. She’s on the cover of this month’s Vanity Fair actress-athon and January’s US Vogue (“Hollywood’s Swede heart”).

And soon she’ll have blockbuster appeal too, starring alongside Matt Damon in the next Jason Bourne film — a role she finds desperately exciting because she watched all the previous films on repeat.

It’s not hard to see why everyone’s falling for Vikander. She’s a scene-stealer. She shines on screen — even managing to pull off a futuristic swimming cap as Ava in the artificial intelligence movie Ex Machina.

She has a wonderful posh-meets-Scandi unplaceable accent and a husky voice. And she’s both grounded and a charmer, revealing this week that her Oscar date won’t be her superstar boyfriend Michael Fassbender (she likes to keep her relationship out of the spotlight) but her mother.

If 2015 was the year the Swedish actress took over the big screen — with a stonking seven films released — 2016 is the year this north London resident will hit the super-league. Get practising that name now.

The skills

The 27-year-old is a polymath. Acting was actually Plan B after dance. She wanted to be a ballerina (hence the perfect posture) but had a series of injuries, with her back plaguing her to this day.

After giving up the tutus, she turned to acting and won a few TV roles. However, after twice being rejected from drama school she applied to law school — and won a place.

Two weeks before she was due to start — textbooks all bought — she was cast in her first feature film, Pure. Amal Clooney nearly had competition as the world’s most glamorous lawyer.

In 2012 Vikander was cast in the Danish film A Royal Affair, despite not speaking the language — so she didn’t understand when the director told her she had the part.

Vikander learnt Danish by recording a friend’s mother speaking her lines. Now she practises extensively with a voice coach for each role.

Her first major English-speaking part was as the charming and innocent Kitty in Joe Wright’s adaptation/ruination (delete according to whether you’ve read the book) of Anna Karenina.

During filming the cast had to stay in cabins with no running water, while wolves and bears roamed outside.

She has refused to be pigeonholed in roles: running the gamut from a fembot who turns out to be cleverer than her creators in Ex Machina to an RP English-enunciating Brit during the First World War in Testament of Youth.

Later this year, she’ll star in Tulip Fever — a film set during the period of tulip mania in early 17th-century Netherlands.

Tulip Fever made a pleasant change in that she had to shoot a scene with Holliday Grainger, while in her previous four films she hadn’t shot a scene with another woman.

As a Swede, feminism is in her bones. “Where I grew up, it’s a word of equality for men and women, not something to question,” she told the Guardian. And, endearingly, she still gets crushes on other actresses: her heroines include Helena Bonham Carter and Rachel Weisz.

Latest film reviews

1/99

The statuettes

Vikander’s mantlepiece is already filling up — she won a gong at the Screen Actors’ Guild Awards last month for The Danish Girl.

At the Oscars, the Swede is the bookies’ favourite to win in the Best Supporting Actress category, ahead of Rooney Mara for Carol and Kate Winslet for Steve Jobs.

In the film, Vikander plays the artist wife of Eddie Redmayne’s character, who was one of the first people to undergo gender- reassignment surgery. Vikander described the book in a Telegraph interview as “one of the most sincere and complex love stories I’ve ever read”.

There are those who would rather she had been nominated for Ex Machina, though, believing she’s even more impressive there.

She’s found a parallel between these two films: trans women have told her that her performance as Ava resonates with them for her desire to be fully female.

“They had all cried,” she told the Guardian. “One said she was very emotional during the scene where Ava finally puts her skin on for the first time. I hadn’t really made that connection, yet that was very much what I felt when I did that scene. That longing.”

The style

Every designer wants to dress Vikander but it’ll be Louis Vuitton’s creative director Nicolas Ghesquière who will have that pleasure come Oscar night.

She’s the face of the label — “the new muse of the maison” — and has starred in a number of its campaigns. She grew up watching the Met Ball, so was delighted to get to be Ghesquière’s date last year, in a silver couture gown he’d made for her.

Vikander is a modern, daring dresser. For the Golden Globes she picked a pretty, unfussy, white LV column dress — and made other actresses in their ostentatious gowns look overdone.

She wore a cropped fuchsia camisole with magenta culottes to a film festival do, a strapless wide-leg jumpsuit by Yigal Azrouël and faux-bob for the Hollywood Reporter’s 2016 Nominees Night, and patchwork sequins (LV again, of course) to the SAG Awards.

Before she was committed to Vuitton, she picked Chanel for 2014’s Baftas (an Aztec-inspired top with a feather skirt) and has also been a big supporter of British designers, wearing rose-print Erdem, beaded Mary Katrantzou and modelling Christopher Kane.

Her first red carpet experience — in Cannes — was less glamorous, though. Forced to borrow a Valentino gown at short notice, there was no time to shorten it for her petite frame, so she wore skyscraper heels.

She took them off during the screening but discovered afterwards that her feet had swollen and the shoes would no longer go on. Her agent had to run and search for another pair.

The squeeze

Vikander has been dating Michael Fassbender, 38, since late 2014, with rumours of a break-up being quashed last year.

The pair met filming The Light Between Oceans in Australia and New Zealand and initially kept it on the down-low.

Vikander said in a recent interview that there are so many pictures of them together (including some serious PDAs) that it is silly to deny they are a couple. Currently, they seem to have a disappointing lack of a portmanteau name (come on internet, you are failing me here...).

The Hollywood gossip mill previously linked Vikander with True Blood’s Alexander Skarsgård but the pair denied any romantic entanglement.

There’s also a chance you might have seen her on Tinder. As part of a viral marketing campaign for Ex Machina at a sci-fi festival, a profile was created for her character on the dating app. There must have been a lot of heartbroken men who swiped right, only to find she was an android.

The scene

She’s a Londoner, buying and doing up a place north of the river in 2014. Two years earlier she lived in Notting Hill with the Swedish electro house duo Icona Pop and another friend.

She had a taste of the plight of the young, priced-out Londoner: the four women shared two single beds and the flat had a rat infestation.

She’s used to slumming it, though. She left the parental home in Gothenburg to attend the Royal Swedish Ballet School’s upper school in Stockholm aged just 15, and had to live in a “half-room with a tiny kitchenette”.

Despite moving out so young, she remains very close to her parents, getting her psychiatrist father Svante and her theatre actress mother Maria to read her scripts.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in