Alicia Vikander has put herself in an almost comically stressful situation by agreeing to be in a play for which the ending hasn’t yet been written — even though, when I meet her, she and Andrew Lincoln have been rehearsing for two months and they open in two weeks. Sorry, “one week and six days”, as she puts it, looking slightly like a duck who has wandered too far from its pond and is starting to feel the breeze.
This is the unique thrill of working on The Lady From the Sea with Simon Stone, the playwright behind Yerma (starring Billie Piper) and Phaedra, who writes the scenes as he goes along and turns up to rehearsals with his laptop in hand, headed straight to the printer while the cast wait, agog.
Vikander has such professional discipline that she moved from her native Gothenburg to Stockholm to join the Royal Swedish Ballet when she was only 15, after which her focus switched to film acting in London and Hollywood. Ex Machina, The Man from UNCLE and the starring role of Lara Croft in Tomb Raider followed. By the age of 27, she had won an Oscar for best supporting actress in The Danish Girl in 2016. (Vikander recently said that she doesn’t think, in a time of growing awareness, that the film starring Eddie Redmayne as a pioneering trans woman has aged well.)
So this seat-of-pants method, which is to be performed live on stage at the Bridge Theatre, in the round, with nowhere to hide, and her first time in theatre, is freaking her out.
I’m embarrassed that I live in Lisbon but don’t speak Portuguese... my older son translates for me
“I’m the kind of person who, just in general, likes to plan, have everything sorted. That’s how I find my calm, and also where I know that I normally work best, so I have had to rewire myself,” she explains, before adding in lots of positive descriptions of this new modus operandi, like “incredibly challenging, enriching” and “wonderfully intense”, all while almost shaking like a leaf. It doesn’t half make me want to see the play.
She can’t give me any spoilers about her character, beyond the basic info that she’s a woman called Ellida who lives in a remote country house and fears she may have settled too easily for a comfortable life married to a well-off doctor, before a lover from her past appears. Stone has often reworked Ibsen’s stories and so I ask if this woman is going, in Ibsen fashion, to blow up her respectable life? Vikander sighs wistfully, dreamily, happily. If only she knew!
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We are sitting in the café beside their rehearsal space, and if someone hadn’t led me to the table, I’m not sure I would have spotted her. Vikander is now 36 and has been famous for over a decade. You wouldn’t know. In 2017 she married the actor Michael Fassbender, with whom she has two children. She wears no make-up, unshowy clothes, her face glows but is something of an open book, almost childlike — I ask if she can choose not to be recognised?
“Yes. Though when I have a film coming out, I can feel this difference,” she clicks her fingers, to suggest people starting to recognise her during promotion, “because suddenly you’re in the ether. But when you aren’t seen — because I don’t have social media, there isn’t that possibility for people to see your face.”
You mean, because you’re not on Instagram giving us a tour of your new kitchen, people forget what you look like?
“I do think so. I think because we are otherwise fed so many faces, so much information, and it’s rare to not be on there. And that’s how the world runs now and I do have moments where I wonder and think, well, should I? But I’m already doing the thing I love, and I recognise how fortunate I am to stay off it because if I was a younger actress starting now, it probably wouldn’t be possible. But when I go somewhere to shoot a film, I don’t see the light of day — plus I’ve been living in Lisbon.”
She and Fassbender decided to move to the Portuguese capital a few years ago, partly because he wanted to surf, so they spend their weekends at the beach with their two boys, aged four and one. “It’s such a beautiful place, and the quality of life. We both come from northern countries so to be somewhere you can be outdoors most of the time, especially when you have a family… that’s the big difference.” Vikander is Swedish, and the boys can attend the Swedish school in Lisbon, “the second international school that ever opened in Europe”, but also learn the local language. “It’s embarrassing that I can’t speak Portuguese — my older son translates for me.” The kids are becoming trilingual, “that’s their future”. ( We don’t discuss tax, but Portugal’s attractively low rates for expats may also form part of the appeal.)
Yet they’ve now all been in London together for months (read Alicia Vikander’s guide to London, here), this being the first time in their parenting journey that both parents have been working at the same time — he’s making a TV show while she’s doing the play. Until now they alternated jobs so one of them was always with the kids. So is London, their former home, luring them back?
“I mean now that we are here,” she nods, “and I mean this was both of our homes for so many years so we’ve been super happy coming back and you get swept into it quite quickly — some of my best and oldest friends are here. And we were here last year for five months, and we soon realised that we are probably going to come back again next year, because I’ve been talking about wanting to do theatre for a long time.” Having lived all around the capital, her compass dial eventually landed on north and it is there she always returns, walking on Hampstead Heath and swimming in the ponds.
“But I think we are a bit addicted to… not London so much as moving itself. I have moved around like this since my early twenties, so it’s definitely the people in my family that are my home, not the place. Obviously the idea of uprooting children, of course that’s something I have thought about, and that I am thinking about… but there are a lot of upsides.”
We are a bit addicted to... not London so much as moving itself. The people in my family are my home, not the place
Vikander’s mother died at the end of 2022, “and I’m just so happy that she got to become a grandmother for a couple of years. Because it is that thing, the day that you become a mother yourself — oh my God. I was like — did it take me 32 years to realise? To say thank you, so much — wow. And I’m so happy I got to say it to her, and to mean it.”
They now bring their older son into the conversation, offering him the stability of staying at his normal house and school, “but the parents have to go away. And he immediately said no and I prefer us being together. So now we do the circus version of family. And it really did come together because I am a big fan of Simon’s work, and of all the people I could have hoped to get a meeting with… it turned out to be him!”
She’s still perfecting their house in Lisbon though — she might not be on TikTok but she has other internet addictions: Pinterest, the vintage resale site 1st Dibs and various French auction houses, all to feed her other passion as an amateur interior designer. “I also have a dealer who texted me at 7.30am on a Tuesday morning saying, ‘I’m in a church that they demolished and I found these three chandeliers, this is the price, you have two hours to decide.’” She bought all three, hung two in her house in Lisbon, sold one on 1st Dibs “and I made a profit! That is my thing.”
She loves “the hustle of finding the good stuff. And also of seeing designers who you think people are going to start going big for in the next few years. Because it’s interesting — with art, I don’t have that eye. I’ve realised that how some people look at an artist and know that that’s who they’re buying now — well that’s what I do with a chair.”
Yet she commissioned a weaver she found on Pinterest to make wall hangings for the house too. “I saw her work and I sent a picture of my room and some of the things I already had, talked about the textures and colours I wanted. I love craftsmanship, I was so happy to pay what she asked me to pay. And it’s wonderful because we also got to know each other.”
Vikander’s internet usage is not all good though — “oh I need someone to ban me from my phone. I’m on the news a lot — re-reading news. I already read it! Why am I reading it again?”
AI, however, has proved transformative — she has even created an AI version of her co-star Andrew Lincoln whom she can rehearse with at home. Sorry, what? “There are apps for it now, it’s so cool! Because it takes me a while to learn lines, that’s why I normally like the prep time, especially if you don’t have the other actors there. With this app you can choose the character, so you can say British, Aussie, female, middle-aged, whatever, and then they read the lines. I’ve realised that some AI voices are upgraded and actually quite good, while others are more flat and robotic. I’ve told Andrew, my AI Andrew is not on your level — but he’s very good too!” She laughs.
I ask what Lincoln’s response was. There is a pause. “I think it’s not his world. I don’t think I’m going to find Andrew with a robotic Alicia — I don’t think that works for him.”
Rehearsing at home isn’t going too well either — the baby woke her up twice last night so she needs to work away from the children after doing early mornings with them. It’s now 10am and she’s headed into the rehearsal space’s own solitary confinement. “Honestly, it has padded walls, a sink and no window. It looks like a cell. So that’s where I’m going to be, alone, for the next two hours. Where no one can hear you scream.”
The Lady from the Sea is at the Bridge Theatre until November 8; bridgetheatre.co.uk
