Alicia Vikander: Seven things we learned from her This Cultural Life interview

1. She has traumatic memories of seeing her mum on stage

Vikander was born in Gothenburg, Sweden. Her father is a psychiatrist and her mother was an actor. Vikander’s first experience of the theatre was, she jokes, “traumatic”. Her parents divorced when she was very small, so “all those times when Mum couldn’t find a babysitter, I’d spend that time in the theatre… One of the few memories I have of her being on stage was some sort of dramatic moment. She… walked to the back of the theatre… opened this huge gate and went out… I thought that was it. My mum’s now gone forever!”

Vikander pictured in 2014

Her mother discouraged her young daughter’s acting ambitions, to shield her from a precarious industry, but Vikander was determined to follow her. “She was totally against me doing it,” says Vikander. “I just had tantrums and fits and locked myself in my room until she said yes.”

2. She made her stage debut at seven. It lasted five years

At the age of just seven, Vikander was cast in Kristina från Duvemåla, a musical by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, playing the youngest member of the central family. She remained in the show for five years. “[The title character] had seven children, so I started off playing the youngest child. By the time I finished, I played the oldest. I did all the parts.”

After leaving the play, she was reminded that her mother’s concerns about the harshness of the industry were valid. “I went to an audition when I was about 12 and I was not very good. It didn’t go very well. I still have this reminiscence of being aware… you can’t take this for granted.”

3. Playing a witch convinced her she wanted to act

At 15, Vikander moved to Stockholm, alone, to study ballet. “There were nine or ten of us in our class, and we were all living by ourselves,” she says. “I think I went out until like four in the morning three times in the first week, because I could, then realised I was so tired!”

Her final year of ballet convinced her she really wanted to act. “I did the lead in… La Sylphide [about a man who falls in love with a beautiful spirit]. There’s a witch in it and it’s a big character part. They were only seeing guys [for it] … I was like, ‘I want to go in for
the witch!’ I did and I got it… I did half the shows as the sylphide and half as the witch… I preferred doing the big character part much more. That was my talent.”

4. She nearly melted playing a robot

In 2014, Vikander appeared as Ava, an artificial intelligence robot, in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, for which she was BAFTA nominated. If she looks like a CG creation in the film, that’s not the case. “We didn’t have the money [to do it all CG],” she says, so she had to wear a full, skin-tight robotic suit, “and then they just removed certain bits [digitally]… It was tough because we were in a tin box of a studio and it was a heatwave in London… I was in that Ava costume all day and boiling inside. But… I did feel like another creature when I put that costume on.”

5. Jude Law made a very “stinky” king

In 2023, Vikander played Catherine Parr opposite Jude Law’s King Henry VIII in Firebrand. Vikander says she liked to listen to music, particularly techno, when getting in character as the Queen because “it keeps a certain tempo and heartbeat… constant stress.” Law had other methods for creating the air of the King, who had an ulcerated leg. He had a fragrance created that included notes of “pus, dried blood, old faeces,” says Vikander. “It was just horrendous. He really did genuinely stink. It was so bad… a camera operator started to shake… and then he was gagging. That was pretty wild.”

6. Her son wants to follow in the family business

Vikander is married to fellow actor Michael Fassbender, who she met on the 2016 movie The Light Between Oceans. They have two children. Despite efforts to keep their children away from their professional lives, Vikander says their four-year-old son seems to have caught the performing bug. “We’ve never taken him on set or shown him anything of what we do,” she says, “but the nursery called up, because they built this outdoor stage there, and they said, ‘It’s hilarious. We can’t get him off the stage!’… We want him to find his own thing, but you don’t know how much of it’s genetic.”

7. She’s “finally becoming a real actress”

Although she acted in Sweden from a very young age, Vikander is only now taking on her first role on a London stage. She’s appearing in Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea at the Bridge theatre, playing a woman whose stale life is upended by the return of an old lover. “I am tremendously, wonderfully nervous,” she says, speaking ahead of the play’s opening. She sees it, in part, as something she’s doing for her mum. “She passed away two years ago. I always thought I was going to be on stage. In Sweden, if you’re an actress you’re on stage… In a wonderful way, I feel like she’s kind of looking down on me like, ‘Ah, you’re finally becoming a real actress’.”