The Queen’s Wood Cafe in Highgate, London, is one of those formerly secret places in London that used to be known only by locals and is now a star on Instagram. Built for a wood-keeper in 1898, it is like a fairy-tale cottage, emerging unexpectedly from the trees around it, covered in fading bunting and twinkling lights. I’ve suggested it as a quiet place to meet, but Alicia Vikander already knows it. “I used to come here with the kids,” she says with a smile, as she goes to the counter to buy us both a coffee. She may have been born in Sweden and since settled in Portugal, but a big part of her heart belongs to north London, where she lived for many years.
She’s here at the moment because she is about to make her first appearance onstage since she was a teenager, opposite Andrew Lincoln at the Bridge Theatre, in director Simon Stone’s radical reimagining of The Lady From the Sea by Henrik Ibsen. For nearly 15 years Vikander, 36, has been a fixture on screens, bringing her delicate yet exacting talent and endless versatility to bear on films that range from historical biopic (Testament of Youth) to sci-fi (Ex Machina) to blockbuster action (Tomb Raider and Jason Bourne). She was 27 when she won an Oscar for The Danish Girl, and with it global renown. “Alicia is the most formidable actor,” says Eddie Redmayne, her costar in that film. “She has this dumbfounding and unique mix of physical, tangible technique. I don’t know if that stems from her rigorous ballet and dance background mixed with complete abandon and freedom in the moment.”
Wearing a black Toteme coat—“very Swedish”—against an early summer breeze, with her Louis Vuitton (she’s a brand ambassador) handbag on the table between us, she flings herself into our conversation with enthusiasm and intelligence. She is excited and a little terrified about her latest role. The Lady From the Sea, one of Ibsen’s most mysterious and allusive plays, centers on the figure of Ellida, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter with a maritime obsession. In the original, she is married to a doctor and haunted by the death of her infant son, when a sailor from her past, a man who had asked her to wait for him, returns to claim her. (A caveat: since Stone has a reputation for completely rethinking classic plays, any resemblance to the original is likely to be tangential.)
Vikander’s casting came about in a similar way to how Billie Piper was chosen for Stone’s groundbreaking Yerma at the Young Vic in 2016: Her agent rang and made a persistent case. “That’s always a really good sign,” says Stone, “because if the actor is brilliant enough, the hunger adds that extra 30 percent. She’s a great collaborator. I mean, she grew up in a theater family—I think that’s what makes her pragmatic about her job, because she sees it as a family business. People hand over their craft to the next generation. She’s been yearning for the sense of the collective.”
The Lady From the Sea represents a homecoming for Vikander in more ways than one. Her parents separated when she was young and she lived mainly with her mother, Maria Fahl, who was a renowned stage actor in Sweden. “If you were an actress, you were on stage,” Vikander remembers.
On nights her mother couldn’t get a babysitter, Vikander, who has five half-siblings on her father’s side, would be backstage, mainly watching Shakespeare. “I watched Romeo and Juliet 24 times, apparently,” she recalls. “I had that feeling of being immersed in something completely other—a bit like when kids watch cartoons over and over. I dreamed of being up there. That was what I visualized. I didn’t even think of film—that was so far away, that wasn’t real. Stage was what my mom did. It was what I grew up with.”
And yet, she will be a month shy of her 37th birthday when she makes her British theater debut next month. We have met once before, I remind her, when she was playing a young Vera Brittain in the film adaptation of the memoir Testament of Youth in 2014. “I think when I met you then that I would have been surprised how long it’s taken me to get on stage,” she says. “I thought this day would come sooner.”
Her mother died in 2022. They were very close and it is clearly a deep sadness to Vikander that she is not around to witness this moment. “She died with a script next to her. It’s actually true. She worked until she couldn’t. The whole idea was that I was going to get to do this when she was with me.”
Ibsen marks another first for her: Vikander taking a job at the same time as her actor husband, Michael Fassbender. That Fassbender has been based in London filming the second series of the spy drama The Agency has made the whole thing possible. Normally they take turns to be at home with their two sons, aged four and one, alternating jobs on film sets.
“It can be very long days, and a lot of the time you will leave before the kids get up and then maybe not be back before they sleep. So knowing that one parent is always home…” Her sentence trails away. “With all the parent and mom guilt that you already carry with you constantly—I am battling that a lot, all the time. Now with the four-year-old we talk about it: ‘It’s time for Papa to go back and then I’ll be at home.’”
She wonders how her mother coped. “How did that work?” she marvels. “The only way she could have done it was because in Sweden, if you were at the state theater, they will subsidize you to have a babysitter between certain hours. There would have been no way she could have done her job without that.”
Vikander acknowledges that motherhood has changed her. “I love being a mom. I was terrified of what it is, going into it. I wasn’t really very maternal until I had my own children. But maybe even more after the second one arrived, I started to feel like, OK, I know this a little bit now. I’m a bit kinder to myself too. ”
She smiles, happily. She and Fassbender met when they starred in the 2016 film adaptation of the interwar-set bestseller The Light Between Oceans. They have made their main home in Lisbon. “My husband said he wanted to be somewhere he could surf every day. We’re on the beach with the kids every weekend we are there.”
The pair has just made another film together, Hope, by the South Korean director Na Hong-jin. Vikander had longed to collaborate with him ever since she saw his acclaimed horror film The Wailing and had approached him about another project before he asked her to star in this new film. It didn’t quite turn out as planned. “I became pregnant and Michael was shooting Black Bag. There was no way of figuring it out. And then they said, ‘Well, what if you shoot your scenes at different times?’” She giggles. “We shot with Korean doubles as each other. It was like, we’ll work together, but not at the same time.”
Vikander chooses projects carefully and her fascination with science fiction informs some of her picks, such as Alex Garland’s 2014 film Ex Machina, in which she played a wide-eyed robot; she is currently developing a sci-fi movie of her own. But she also seeks out difference, such as being directed by the acclaimed Brazilian Karim Aïnouz in his first English language movie, Firebrand, in which Vikander was a compelling Catherine Parr to Jude Law’s Henry VIII. “I like entering projects that will give me new experiences.”
This attitude explains the huge variety of work that she has undertaken since the sudden success of The Danish Girl, in which she played wife to Eddie Redmayne’s transgender artist. Although it earned Vikander the best-supporting-actress Oscar, and a best-actor nomination for Redmayne, those involved were criticized both at the time and since for casting a cis actor in the title role and for contributing to stereotypes.
Vikander, whose father is a psychiatrist in Sweden who advises on gender confirmation surgery, stands by it. “I’m the first one to say it already feels extremely dated, which I think is a good thing. At that time, it was a pivot in something that it made [the subject of transgender lives] at least discussed. I hope that in a way it was a bit of an eye-opener and opened the way for art to cover those themes.”
The whirlwind of success that winning an Oscar brought was hard to deal with, she says. “It went so fast. I didn’t have any time to reflect on what’s happening. It was a moment that probably took me years to understand, of realizing how a public persona of you is created, one I too looked at and wondered, ‘Who’s that?’”
Perhaps there is no moment nor role in her career that feels quite so poignant as the one she is about to undertake. “I do feel her very close,” she says of her late mother. “It’s almost like doing this makes this bond very apparent and strong.” She smiles. “I feel she is looking down and saying, ‘Wow, Alicia, you’re going to be a real actress now.’”
The Lady From the Sea is at the Bridge Theatre from September 10 to November 8.
In this story: hair, Syd Hayes; makeup, Niamh Quinn. Nails: Simone Cummings. Production: Image Partnership. Digital artwork: May.