Alicia Vikander: ‘If you’re depicting an abusive relationship, you can’t shy away’

To get into the mindset of her latest character, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, Catherine Parr, Alicia Vikander would put in her AirPods between takes, alternating between classical music and “a lot” of techno. “It gave me a bit of physical stress,” she recalls. “Something that never stopped, like a heartbeat that always goes a bit too fast.” Jude Law, who plays her on-screen husband, got into character by dousing himself in the scent of blood, faecal matter and sweat. “It was unbearable – like rotten fish,” says Vikander. “It was a very present reminder of what it must have been like to enter the same room as Henry VIII during that time.”

Karim Aïnouz’s handsome, visceral film Firebrand is a distinctly modern take on Tudor history, getting under the skin of what it might have been like to be married to someone who could at any point call for your beheading. For many viewers, it will provide an introduction to the somewhat overlooked historical figure of Parr, the first woman to be published under her own name in England. It also marks a shift in the way Henry VIII has traditionally been portrayed: less of a vigorous womaniser, and more of a domestic abuser prone to petty cruelties and violent mood swings. “If you’re showing an abusive relationship, in which you’re afraid for your life every day, you can’t shy away,” says Vikander. “It was pretty grim. There would have been 300 men in the palace and about 12 women, who were confined to two chambers. Just imagining these women, never being able to go outside – it dawns on you emotionally, what that can be like.”

Many of the themes in Firebrand are depressingly relevant to the present day: plague, war, tyrants, women being reduced to their reproductive organs. At its heart, it is a conflict of reason and tolerance versus violence and hatred, a dynamic familiar to anyone following politics today. “I don’t think people have changed,” says Vikander. “It’s maybe not the most optimistic, but I was reading an article about how wars recur and it’s all a cycle – the fact that it should return is kind of inevitable. But everything is exponential at the moment.”

While they were filming, King Charles III’s coronation took place against a backdrop of global unrest and the cost of living crisis. “It was interesting, because he came out, [wearing] the cape, and we said: ‘Wow, see how different that is from reality.’ And that made us think: why would we trust these paintings that are 500 years old? Obviously, it’s theatre. It’s about creating an image that you want to send out for the people, or to gain power.” Rather than believing the projection, the film peels back the layers of veneer to get to something darker and recognisably human.

Perhaps there is something cyclical about cinema as well: one of Vikander’s earliest film roles, 2012’s A Royal Affair, similarly followed an idealistic young woman married to a cruel and boorish Danish king, and who with the assistance of a like-minded lover attempts to steer the kingdom’s politics in in a more progressive direction. In the years since, she has played a dizzying array of roles, from Gloria Steinem to Lara Croft, period dramas to cutting-edge sci-fi.

It is easy to see why so many directors have been drawn to Vikander: on screen, she shifts effortlessly between steeliness and vulnerability, conveying deep emotion through micro-expressions; her background in ballet shows in her physical self-possession. There were a few years during the mid-2010s when she was ubiquitous: in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, as the troublingly human AI Ava; in The Danish Girl, for which she won a best supporting actress Academy Award; and Jason Bourne, playing an ambitious CIA hacker.

We are speaking in a cafe in north London, where Vikander will be stationed for the next few months, preparing for a new project. Since 2017 she has lived in Lisbon, Portugal, with her husband, the actor Michael Fassbender. “We used to meet people at the pub on Sundays here,” she says, looking out at the leafy street. “Then in Lisbon, it was pretty wild sitting on a Sunday at a beach club in February. It was like: ‘Oh, look, we’re doing the same thing, but it looks a bit different.’ Especially with kids.” In a recent interview, Vikander revealed she had given birth to her second child, which has been reported as a “secret pregnancy” in some outlets. “It was the strike and then I was just working,” she says casually. “I’ve always been very private, in the sense that I don’t talk a lot about my family. I mean, I didn’t make an announcement.”

Today, she is in off-duty glam: white T-shirt, no makeup, statement gold jewellery. For an A-lister, she appears remarkably at ease with her surroundings; if anyone recognises her, they do not let on. “Most of my friends are not actors or in the industry at all,” she says. “That has definitely been really wonderful sometimes, because this industry can be quite overwhelming, and it’s been nice to have a life that is very much away from that.

“But obviously having a partner and a husband who knows it more than anyone, and who knows me better than anyone – it’s nice having someone who understands you and the situation you’re in and shares it.” How has it been balancing work and family life around their respective schedules? “It’s gone pretty well, actually. We’ve been together almost 10 years and we tend to not work at the same time. We’re more like a circus family, always on the move.”

When she’s not working, she likes to travel and organise social events. “That’s my personality. People know I’m not working when I host dinners” – she does a fantastic Swedish version of bouillabaisse with lots of saffron and homemade aioli – “or I make plans for fun things to do. I really do care about those relationships and keeping the people I love close to me.” Life in Lisbon sounds idyllic: “Thirty minutes from the city centre, you’re on a beach that looks like nowhere else in Europe – you can’t see where the beach ends both ways. There’s just a few fish shacks.”

You get a sense that Vikander is bemused but not particularly fazed by the public’s interest in her life (“That’s just how the world works – I guess by now I’m somewhat used to it”); each question is tackled with enthusiasm and a brisk efficiency. Born in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1988, she was on stage from an early age: at seven, she starred in a musical written by Abba’s Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson; aged eight, she won a children’s lip-sync talent show. Her parents separated when she was small and she was mostly raised by her mother, the stage actor Maria Fahl Vikander.

“I had a really great childhood. I mean, it was very different from this,” she gestures to the imposing buildings around us. “I grew up in a studio flat with my mother and she introduced me to art from a very young age. And even though we didn’t have much money to do things – we could never travel when I was a kid – she did take me to the theatre, she introduced me to books and music – I didn’t know that she was doing it, because it was just what was at home. But as an adult, I can see what a rich upbringing my mother gave me, in that sense.”

Aged 15, Vikander moved to Stockholm on her own to train with the Royal Swedish Ballet school, spending a summer at the American Academy of Ballet in New York. After an injury in her late teens obliged her to sideline dance in favour of acting, she starred in a television series directed by Tomas Alfredson. She then applied to drama school, but was turned down twice. She was beginning to consider a career in law when she was cast as the lead in 2010 Swedish film Pure, followed shortly afterwards by a role in Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina (Law was a co-star). Looking back at the rejections now, does she feel vindicated? “To be honest, I didn’t feel that. The second time I was there, doing tests for a week, part of me felt: ‘Maybe this isn’t for me.’ There was just part of me that was wondering.”

She looks momentarily lost. “Nowadays, there’s so many actors that are self-taught, or taught through the people they work with – they become your teachers. So, if I had gone [to drama school], I wouldn’t be here.” If her younger self could see Vikander now, what would she have made of the woman she has become? She thinks for a few seconds. “I think she might have been amazed by how content and calm and happy I seem, considering. It’s also part of being in your mid-20s compared to now – there were so many more worries I carried with me then.”

Her mother died in 2022, a loss Vikander clearly still feels keenly. “It’s nice to talk about her,” she says quietly. “And with my kids, I feel like she’s around.” Through the decades, her mother kept diaries, each detailing a year in her life; she left two to Alicia in her will. “Reading them was pretty wild. She wrote practically every day, so to read a year of my mother’s life, where she’s 24, 31, gives you an insight into your own parent that is beyond anything. It’s so private. She told me when she was alive that she was going to burn all of it, and obviously I read it feeling: ‘This was never meant to be read by anyone.’” Her eyes widen. “So to get that close to her, and even being almost 10 years older than she was in one of them… It felt like a TV series, as thrilling and exciting.” She grins. “She even had an index of the guys she had been meeting over the years, so I could go back and check who it was.”

She is on good terms with her father, psychiatrist Svante Vikander; through him, she has five half-siblings. Has his profession been useful for her, both as an actor and in life, in terms of figuring out why human beings act the way they do? “I’ve had long talks with my dad since I was very young. He’s so interested in life and in people: he makes people talk, because he’s a brilliant listener. I do like to talk with him about human beings and emotions and what people do. And like you said, that is a lot of what I do for a living as well. So I definitely think we meet there.”

Partly through her father’s passion for science fiction, Vikander developed an interest in artificial intelligence. Ten years on from starring in Ex Machina, in which her Ava was one of the most devastating, and chilling, portrayals of AI on screen, I wonder what her thoughts on the subject are now. “It’s happening, and it’s evolving,” she says, growing animated. “I read about it a lot. I listen to experts and podcasts to try and keep up. Everything will look very different in only five to 10 years, so I’m trying to figure out how to navigate these changes, how to bring up children in these times. I’m curious and I try to be as positive as possible. Obviously, it’s all about making sure things don’t end up in the wrong hands.”

On one podcast she listened to, the discussion turned to what these changes may mean for the future of education. “It’s not like we need to memorise anything. In theory, very soon our brain could have instant access ” – she snaps her fingers – “to the entirety of the internet. It’s like asking a mouse if it wants to be as intelligent as a human being. [On the podcast,] he was saying, if we all are that much more intelligent, everyone [else will be too]. We can’t even imagine what we would then collectively do as a human species.”

That sounds slightly terrifying.

“I find that interesting, because you say you’re terrified of that, and I have part of me that finds it pretty exciting as well. Especially in that theory, because a mouse would have a hard time to imagine what the intelligence of a human being is.”

The year after Ex Machina, Vikander starred in The Danish Girl, a film about another subject that has become increasingly divisive over the past decade. “It’s incredible – only a few years after that film came out, it’s become quite dated,” she muses (her co-star Eddie Redmayne has expressed regret at taking the role of transgender painter Lili Elbe, stating that a trans actor should have been cast). Still, she is proud that the film helped spread awareness and understanding of the topic to a wide audience: “People who have been transitioning, trans men and women that I met – it’s been nice to hear that some had used the film as a way in, to show their parents. If it could be part of that discussion, it’s wonderful.” (She keeps her Oscar for it in the family’s country house in France, on a shelf in a downstairs screening room.)

After a relatively quiet few years, with the pandemic followed by the Hollywood writers’ and actors’ strikes, and the birth of her sons, Vikander’s schedule is now busier than ever. She played a mysterious, unsettling dual role in The Green Knight, a stylised A24 adaptation of 14th-century chivalric poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, alongside Dev Patel. In 2022, she took on the titular, catsuit-wearing role in Olivier Assayas’s meta HBO series Irma Vep – based on his own film from 1996 starring Maggie Cheung, in turn inspired by Louis Feuillade’s 1915-16 silent film series Les Vampires – in which she played a lightly fictionalised version of herself.

After acting alongside Fassbender in 2016’s The Light Between Oceans, they will both appear in Na Hong-jin’s Hope, currently in post-production (Taylor Russell and Squid Game’s Hoyeon co-star). How was working together again? “We were extremely excited – wehad been looking to find something to do together. But obviously, it needed to be something where we both wanted to do our separate roles and be part of this specific project. And the idea of doing something in Korea, at least for me, was extremely thrilling.”

She will be working with Assayas and Law again on The Wizard of the Kremlin, an adaptation of Giuliano da Empoli’s novel about a fictionalised spin doctor, likely inspired by Vladimir Putin consigliere Vladislav Surkov. “It’s about a very interesting time in Russian history,” says Vikander. “The 90s in Moscow must have been extraordinary to live through.” Told from the Russian perspective, the story depicts the rise of an authoritarian leader. “This is a story where maybe, culturally, we think: ‘Oh, this is other, this happened somewhere else.’ And then you realise, no, it just happened 15 years earlier [than in the west]. So who are we to criticise anything, considering that that’s very much part of western politics and history at the moment?” Later this year, she stars alongside Cate Blanchett and Charles Dance in Rumours, a black comedy about G7 leaders who get lost in the woods (she plays the secretary general of the European Commission).

The AirPods will probably come out again. “I really enjoy this time at the beginning of a project – it’s that feeling of first love that I always have when there’s something new and exciting, and I don’t know how I’m going to tackle it yet.” There is something magical about being on set, she says. “You’re in a scene and suddenly everything clicks. And no one really knows how or why that happened just then, but everyone in the room is aware of it. I guess that intangible thing and the mystery of it is still what attracts all of us to go back for it. That is probably why I do this.”

Firebrand is in UK and Irish cinemas from 6 September