A real game changer

It’s 8.15 am, and Alicia Vikander — the hottest young actress in the world right now — walks into a café in north London. “I’m such a morning person,” she says in a low, slightly husky voice with barely a trace of her native Swedish accent. “Which is helpful, because you normally start at 4.30-5 am if you’re filming.”

The Oscar-winning actress inhabits a role completely, utterly convincing whether she’s playing a middle-class Brit whose life is derailed by the First World War in Testament of Youth, or an intelligent but unmistakably mechanical android in Alex Garland’s thoughtful directorial debut Ex Machina.

Next month sees the delayed opening of her first blockbuster, Guy Ritchie’s stylish reworking of the 1960s TV series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. In this kind of film, we’re used to female characters who exist solely to be the love interest, but here Vikander’s impossibly glamorous East German car mechanic is central to the action, while the bad guys are led by an equally glamorous Elizabeth Debicki.

“Seeing one of the big-franchise movies have such strong female characters is quite rare,” says Vikander, who at the age of just 26 is in the enviable position of being able to pick her roles. “Here they have their own agendas, and it was fun playing a character where you’re not sure what side she is really on.”

It’s also the first time she’d been asked to act in a comedy, which she says was scary — although she adds that fear tends to be what drives her. “It was a nice, collaborative vibe and Ritchie made me improvise — which, when it’s not in my native language, got me even more terrified! But then you start to trust each other and to have fun. 

“It was a revelation when somebody actually laughed at something I did.” Vikander acted on stage as a child, but her main focus was always dance, and at the age of 15 she moved to Stockholm to study at the Royal Swedish Ballet School. That taught her self-reliance, but, she admits, was tough at times. She says that having the focus you need to be a dancer has served her well ever since, as well as an awareness of movement that she uses to good effect when building her characters.

She trained hard, and suffered injuries — “I still have a back injury that’s never going to be fully recovered” — but ultimately came to realise that she didn’t want it as badly as some of the other girls. “I could see that they had some twinkle in their eye that said it was fun being up at 5 am with all the injuries. They loved it.”

She says that giving up ballet was one of the hardest decisions she’s ever made, but it led her back to acting. After a couple of TV roles, she applied for drama school — and got rejected, two years running. So she decided to study law instead. She’d already bought her books and was ready to start her course when she was offered the lead in Pure, a low-budget indie film that in 2009 won her a Guldbagge Award — the Swedish equivalent of a best actress Oscar.

More Swedish roles followed, and then she was asked to audition for the lead role in the 2012 Danish historical drama A Royal Affair. It was the first time she’d been to Denmark, and she didn’t speak the language at all. So when director Nikolaj Arcel spoke to her afterwards, she didn’t understand him: he had to repeat himself in English before she realised he was giving her the part. The film was nominated for the best foreign language film Oscar, and soon after finishing it she came to the UK for her first English-speaking role, playing the naive Kitty in Joe Wright’s imaginative reworking of Anna Karenina.

Since then, she’s made films back to back. She has spoken English with a German accent in the Wikileaks film The Fifth Estate, as well as beautifully enunciated RP English in Testament of Youth, where she gives a moving central performance as Vera Brittain.

Although chatty and open with a raucous laugh, Vikander dislikes talking about her private life. She met Michael Fassbender, 38, while filming The Light Between Oceans last year, and says there are so many photographs of them out there now that it is pointless to deny they are a couple. “You realise that someone was there, watching, while you were having a coffee with your friends. And you just feel violated,” Vikander says. “It’s a strange feeling. But also, I totally know how privileged I am to be doing what I do, and it’s hard to talk about the downside because the upsides are so amazing.”

Having recently won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in The Danish Girl, Vikander might again be in line for the awards next year as well for her upcoming film The Light Between Oceans (in which she and Fassbender play a couple living in a remote lighthouse in the 1920s, who find a baby and decide to adopt it as their own).

She is also working on the fifth Bourne film, which sees Matt Damon return to the title role. She’s not allowed to talk about it yet, but can’t hide her excitement. “I’m a big Bourne fan,” she says.”