The Danish Girl Star Jumps Out of a Plane and Talks Overnight Fame

My doorbell rang at 5:45 a.m., a half hour early. I suppose I was expecting a suited chauffeur with a joyless expression to match my own, his starlet cargo waiting behind tinted windows. But when I opened the gate, there was Alicia Vikander in black leggings and cross-trainers, her familiar face, with its deeply golden complexion and wide-set brown eyes, looking stricken. It was a fear I recognized immediately, having been up much of the night myself. A few weeks earlier the Swedish actress had suggested that we go skydiving after I threw out some rather tame ideas for a Los Angeles playdate—a game of tennis, a visit to a nearby farmer’s market, a sunny hike in the Palisades. Now the moment had arrived.

"I’m all nerves," she said, her teeth chattering softly. "I think I never really believed we’d have to go through with this." Then she sank to the floor of the breakfast room and, while I made us coffee, gathered my two dogs into her lap as if desperate for the solace of something terrestrial. Her phone rang. "It’s my mum," she said, laughing nervously, "calling to make sure I’m not going to die."

After some wan assurances in Swedish and a double espresso, we drove to the desert, suited up, boarded a plane whose blunt nose had been painted with shark’s teeth, and jumped.

"I have no recollection of that free fall," she says a couple of hours later, over a Thai lunch in Silver Lake, the Eastside neighborhood where a number of her old friends from Stockholm, writers and musicians mainly, are living on a sort of expat Scandinavian commune. "Apparently adrenaline makes every six seconds feel like a single second, so time collapses." Alicia’s English, British-accented, is immaculate, her voice low and conspiratorial. Though a reserve prevails in her demeanor, there seems always to be the threat of giddiness, muted by a natural air of gravity. On-screen Alicia is at once steely and fragile, world-weary and childlike. At times she suggests a less mischievous Anna Karina, Godard’s muse, but mostly she resembles no one at all.

I had assumed, when she suggested our morning heart-starter, that Alicia had a daredevil streak, but it turned out that she was merely solving a problem. The year before, when a group of friends planned a sky dive in New Zealand, she assented in spite of her terror, not wanting to be the boring one. But the dive was canceled due to bad weather. "I was so happy. I thought, Great; let’s go and have a glass of wine instead. So when you suggested I cook with you, which I would have loved, for some reason I was reminded of all the fear I had leading up to that jump that never happened," she explains, "and I thought, Well, if he’s willing, here’s an opportunity to fix something."

To those who knew Alicia as a child ballerina, and to those blown backward by her intense displays on the sets of studio pictures in far-flung locales and with soaring budgets, this determination is a given.

"I push myself hard," she concedes. "I don’t like pain, exactly, but as a ballerina I lived in constant pain. At ballet school in Stockholm, I remember we had a locker where if someone had been to the doctor and gotten painkillers, we divided them among us. In a sense we were all addicted. After I quit dancing, for a while it felt strange not to be in pain. It was as if an old friend, not a good friend but a presence, always tagging along, had left me."

Alicia, who turned 27 in October and celebrated with a big birthday dinner in New York, is smack in the middle of one of those enchanted seasons that occur in Hollywood with the frequency and fanfare of a comet burning across the sky. Like Jessica Chastain in 2011, she seems suddenly to be in everything, all at once. In the last year she has had six films in American theaters, including Testament of Youth, where she played the celebrated pacifist Vera Brittain; Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.; and Alex Garland’s directorial debut, Ex Machina. Tulip Fever, a seventeenth-century romance, and The Light Between Oceans, costarring her real-life boyfriend, Michael Fassbender, are due to arrive this year. Come summer, she’ll star opposite Matt Damon in the next Bourne installment.

"To be quite honest, it’s nerve-racking, the way these films sort of piled up," she says. "It’s a mixed feeling when everything you’ve ever wanted in making films is coming true, and yet you feel scared because it’s happening all at once. Suddenly you’re in rooms with people you’ve looked up to for years, the Judi Denches. You wonder if you’re good, if you have what it takes. You carry an anxiety around with you—I’ve met many actors now who will say this—and the lonely feeling that this could be your one chance."

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Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, which recently hit theaters, may be a tipping point for Vikander, not to mention the movie likely to guarantee her a front-row seat at this year’s Oscars. (It, along with Ex Machina, have already earned her Golden Globe nominations.) Though the film tells the story of Lili Elbe (played by Eddie Redmayne), a Danish artist who in the early 1930s underwent the first known gender-confirmation surgery, it is in equal measure the story of Lili’s wife, Gerda, who grapples with the loss of her husband but grows to become Lili’s closest ally and fiercest advocate.

In a year that saw both wide-ranging enthusiasm for prominent trans figures such as Caitlyn Jenner and the actress Laverne Cox and a painful setback in November, when Houston voters rejected an anti-discrimination ordinance in that city, The Danish Girl’s timing feels serendipitous. And yet the script had been floating around Hollywood for more than a decade before Hooper seized it. It took another six years to cobble together the financing. "This was not a film of the ‘now’ when we started making it," Alicia explains, "and it’s frankly amazing to think of the cultural change that has taken place since we started. But I think it’s important to remember that the issues Lili encountered 100 years ago are still issues. You read the statistics about how trans people are physically and psychologically abused, how they are discriminated against at work. This is a civil rights movement."

Hooper had seen Vikander in Ex Machina and invited her to read with Redmayne, who had already signed on. The director was moved to tears. "Eddie saw me crying after the scene ended," he recalls, "and he said to me later, ‘Well, there’s no great suspense around who you’re going to cast.’ The only other person who’s overpowered me in an audition that way was Annie Hathaway when she came in to read for Les Misérables." If there was any early obstacle, it may have been Alicia’s coloring: She is not the ice sculpture that Hollywood often imagines for its Nordics. Again and again, she has been asked to wear long sleeves and SPF 100 in order to help the makeup department conjure the desired pallor. "Two years of films where I had to be white as a ghost," she says now, laughing. "But I’m a real Swede! In fact, I’m a quarter Finnish. Here I go, exploding stereotypes."

Old friends like to talk about Alicia’s goofiness, her devilishness, her tendency, guard lowered, to be the loudest person at the table, or in the karaoke room, or on the lawn in Beachwood Canyon where Swedish Angelenos like to play kubb, an old Viking version of horseshoes. She worries that in English she comes across as stiff, unnatural. "I think I’ve been very self-conscious trying to express myself in a new language, and sometimes I don’t recognize the person that comes out," she says. "In Swedish the filter between my thoughts and my language is much thinner, so things just flow."

Alicia grew up in Göteborg, Sweden, with her mother, a successful theater actress. Her parents divorced when she was two months old, and she spent weekends and summers with her father, a psychiatrist, and a houseful of half-siblings. She was more or less raised in the theater, and at age seven she landed a role in a professional production of Kristina from Duvemåla (written by the Mamma Mia! creators) at the Göteborg Opera House; she remained in the play for three-and-a-half years. "The theater is a great place for a kid to grow up," she says, "because the grown-ups actually play for a living. And because of that I think they were open to us in a way most adults aren’t."

Meanwhile, she got serious about ballet, moving to Stockholm by herself at age fifteen to train at the Royal Swedish Ballet School. The days began at 6:00 a.m. and ended at 10:00 p.m. Girls piled up on a mattress in the locker room in between classes to sleep. "In ballet school we all had very good grades," she recalls, "but not because you needed to be smart to dance. It was because ballet is about perfection, and if you weren’t perfect, it was like the world was falling apart. I experienced a lot of stress around that. I went to therapy without telling my parents."

Constrained by the world of the ballet, Alicia escaped to the nightclubs of Stockholm, unspooling her bun and throwing on a black T-shirt to conceal her preppiness. She also started auditioning for roles on Swedish television shows. By the time she completed the three-year ballet program in Stockholm, acting had become her passion. "I figured I’d be a local actress, like my mum was," she says. After graduation she filmed dozens of episodes of a popular Swedish soap opera and applied to drama school. She was rejected, then rejected again the next year. She took a job in a flower shop. Desperate for a plan, she applied to law school and got in, but in the late summer of 2009, just before her first semester, she got the lead role in the Swedish film Pure. In 2011 she won a Guldbagge, Sweden’s Oscar, for Best Actress.

"If I’m going to be honest, we were all just waiting for her to become what she’s become," says Alicia’s old friend Caroline Hjelt, of the Swedish electro duo Icona Pop. They first met in Stockholm as teenagers, then shared a London flat together after graduation: four girls, two rooms. Alicia would run lines in her bedroom while Caroline DJed in hers. Insects took over the kitchen, and the four girls shared a single pile of clothing. On Sundays, unable to afford most of the pleasures of London, they rewatched the Bourne movies. It was a difficult time, and a beautiful one. "People assume that when you’re famous you must be naturally extroverted," Caroline says. "Alicia is not, which makes everyone want to know more. She doesn’t realize it, but it’s a kind of superpower."

Colleagues tend to point out Alicia’s self-discipline, her drive, her seriousness of purpose. In an email, Fassbender praised her intense physicality, "the way she embodies her characters from head to toe." They assume these qualities came from a decade of ballet, and while they may be right, these could have been the traits that pushed Vikander toward ballet in the first place. "In dance, if you don’t get it right, you do it again and again and again," Redmayne observes. "There are no kid gloves the way there are sometimes on a movie set, where you’re allowed to save the best performance for the close-up. Alicia grew up with that work ethic. When she came to audition for The Danish Girl, she had just come from The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and she needed to leave in the middle to shoot The Light Between Oceans. I said, ‘You’ve got to take a holiday.’ But no, her appetite was too rapacious for that."

Derek Cianfrance, who directed The Light Between Oceans, compares Alicia’s Isabel—the wife of a lighthouse keeper who takes in a baby carried ashore in a lifeboat—to some of his favorite no-holds-barred screen performances: Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett O’Hara, Gena Rowlands’s Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence, Emily Watson’s Bess in Breaking the Waves. "Alicia has this ripe internal world," he says, "and when the camera points to her, you can see the tornadoes inside. It’s spellbinding. She’s not afraid to be ugly, to be unlikable, to fail. And she gave me as much on the thirtieth take as on the first." Considering that his leads fell in love on set, Cianfrance has no choice but to add matchmaker to his résumé. "The movie is a classic love story, and I cast them with the idea that they would have chemistry together. Evidently they did."

A couple months later, Alicia and I meet in the café of the Electric House on Portobello Road, not too far from the North London flat she bought here two years ago and only a few blocks from the rooms she shared in her early 20s, before the roles started raining down. She gives me a longer, closer hug than I’m expecting, but then we did jump out of an airplane together; we did free-fall at 120 miles per hour together.

"We lived to tell," she says, and we laugh about our grotesquely wind-contorted faces, captured on the videos we were sent home with and hope no one will ever see. (The skydiving company posted Alicia’s on YouTube briefly, until her publicist intervened. Oops.) By now a few degrees more famous than when we first met, she is not yet utterly besieged. "I can still go camping with my friends or go on the tube or the bus," she says, though what she is in fact doing is flying to New York tonight for the premiere of Fassbender’s Steve Jobs. "I feel, for now, that I’m still able to see this industry from both sides. Sometimes I wonder whether that’s going to change and suddenly I’m going to just—I don’t know, go to the other side, if there is another side. I still have that fantasy, or maybe fear, about celebrity."

The first bitter taste of fame came this fall, when the tabloid media began circulating a story that she and Fassbender had broken up. Alicia does not discuss her private life, and she has already learned not to engage those outlets that would like to force her to respond one way or another. But she makes clear that this story was balderdash. "I always believed there must be some truth to the stuff you read," she says. "But I learned."

Today she wears what appears to be the Alicia uniform: dark-gray jeans, T-shirt, flaxen sweater. Now the face of Louis Vuitton and one of the house’s ambassadors on the red carpet, she sparkles at the wrist and the neck with LV baubles, and a gray bouclé overcoat lies in a splendid puddle on the banquette. Alicia was more or less an H&M girl before she had other options, splurging occasionally on Adidas trainers, and she conveys what might be called an embarrassed glamour. Slight and deceptively low-wattage, she is the most beautiful woman in the room whom you might not even notice at all. (And though Bourne starts shooting the next week, she is far from a bursting physical specimen; she flexes her bush-league biceps and laughs.)

Alicia admits to having felt intimidated by fashion before fashion embraced her, and she remembers the way her first couture dress, a Valentino borrowed for Cannes in 2012, recruited some atavistic corner of her brain that dreamed of being a princess. "I suddenly became seven again, caring about things I didn’t think I cared about at all," she remembers of the dress, fitted for a model and therefore far too long for her five-foot-four-inch frame, though a pair of towering heels lifted the hem just enough.

Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton’s artistic director, cast Alicia after her films had already convinced him that she could play a range of different women in his ad campaigns. "She’s unpredictable," he says, recalling his surprise when she pulled up to a photo shoot in Barcelona on the back of Fassbender’s motorcycle. "She seems at once to be from the past and from the future."

It’s true that Alicia has eluded predictability, though not merely by trading corsets for electrodes. In Ex Machina, she made the robot Ava’s gait a little bit imperfect, precisely because robots should be perfect, and she wanted her character to be something more, or something less, than a robot. Her marvelous Gerda is still more nuanced. "Your job as an actor is to try to understand your character’s humanity," she says. "When she does things that people might judge harshly, you have to summon a real sympathy for her. When she is purely good and you fear that you’ll become disconnected from her, you search for doubts, flaws. In the end, you succeed when you show both sides."

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