Positive Accent: rising star Alicia Vikander relies on the fear factor

Rising star Alicia Vikander doesn’t like to make things easy for herself, relying on the fear factor.

Alicia finally finding her voice

Alicia Vikander doesn’t make things easy for herself. In her short but striking career the gifted Swedish actress has learned ­Danish to be an English queen in A Royal Affair (with a Danish cast), made her Eng­lish-language debut as a Russian aristocrat in Anna Karenina (with a British cast), played an immigrant in Perth in Son of a Gun and ­mastered a German accent for The Fifth Estate (with real Germans). Now, in Testament of Youth, Vikander unveils her best cut-glass ­English as Vera Brittain, the figurehead of ­British World War I pacifism (with another cast of Brits).

Consequently, Vikander’s own accent hops around. Interviewed in the US, she has the vowels of a mall cruising valley girl; when we talk in central London, she sounds very British.

“I’m just totally all over the place!” says the 26-year-old, with a husky guffaw. For her role in Guy Ritchie’s forthcoming reboot of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. — one of six films in which this hottest of properties stars this year — Ritchie advised her to use her own accent.

“I don’t know what my own accent is! Because the only thing I’ve done since I’ve started to work abroad is do new accents. When I did Ex Machina (another upcoming film, in which she plays an android) and hung about with Domhnall Gleeson a lot, I apparently started to go Irish.”

If that makes her sound ditzy or supine, Vik­ander is neither. Perching alertly on a sofa in grey jeans and blue blazer, she alternates throwaway asides with sober ruminations about her craft. She’s a serious, driven actress who’s keenly aware of her position at the tipping point between next big thing and marquee star. Outrageously beautiful, yes, but her screen presence is about more than caramel skin, tousled locks and Venus pout.

Her acting talent, too, goes beyond the ability to leap linguistically across Baltic and Atlantic. Indeed, as Brittain — who abandoned a place at Oxford to volunteer as a nurse at the front and from whose memoir of the same name Testament of Youth is adapted — it’s her wordless scenes that hit the hardest. Whether she’s reacting to a fateful telephone call or walking, dazed, through a field of dying men, the eloquence is all in her brown eyes and dancer’s poise (she studied for nine years at the Royal Swedish Ballet School).

That’s how it has been since she broke through in the noughties in the gritty Swedish drama Pure, then the decidedly un-gritty costume drama A Royal Affair. When I ask how she convinced Nikolaj Arcel, director of the latter, that she could master Danish, the answer is simple: “I think with my acting, in a way. I went for it emotionally. Nikolaj said, ‘I went back over one of the first tapes you did — I have no idea what you’re saying but you’re really good!’ ”

The best way to work herself up into that kind of lather? Being scared out of her wits. “Most roles I’ve taken on I’ve always felt a lot of fear,” she says. Preparing to play Brittain, she had “a dialect coach and many sleepless nights”. The fear factor was raised another few notches by the knowledge that her performance was being scrutinised by Brittain’s equally formidable daughter, Shirley Williams.

Fortunately the grande dame of British politics has been effusive in her praise for Vikander. “She does capture her: her candour and her blazing honesty.” Williams also shared some insights about her mother. “Shirley said she admired her a lot but that she didn’t have any humour,” Vikander says. A century on, it probably doesn’t count as a spoiler to point out that Brittain lost her fiance (played in the film by Kit Harington of Game of Thrones), brother and two friends in the war. Given that, you can probably forgive her a certain lack of levity.

Vikander also points out that before the war, Vera was “probably quite different to the person Shirley knew” (Williams was born in 1930) and she tried to add more humour to the scenes that take place before the men in Brittain’s life enlist. We see her swimming, carefree, in a lake and larking about with her brother.

She also revelled in other, less obviously likable aspects of the character, notably the stubbornness that Brittain needed to defy the wishes of her father (played by Dominic West) and go to Oxford when it was still rare for women to do so. “The first time I read the book at the beginning I found it a bit difficult to like her because of that pig-headedness. Then you realise she had to be like that,” Vikander says.

The film plays out like a real-life Atonement, with Brittain as its proto-feminist hero. “It was remarkable that she was able to emotionally survive all the things that she went through and still become that great writer, use her experiences,” Vikander says. “She’s so modern, she feels like a friend I could have now, have a coffee with down on the street. It makes you ­realise how far the female revolution has come over 100 years. I feel so connected with her and still she couldn’t walk out of the door without a chaperone next to her.”

As for Vikander’s own life, the fact Noomi Rapace, another Swede, had already crossed over into Hollywood in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo films “probably helped me”, she says, although she bristles when I say that they’ve been compared. “I don’t think I’m compared to her. I think we’re quite different.”

When injuries and disillusionment persuaded her to switch from ballet to acting, the advice of her parents proved useful. Vikander’s mother is a stage actress and her father is a psychiatrist, which sounds like a dream combination for someone with dramatic ambitions.

Having grown up in Gothenburg with her five half-siblings, Vikander moved to London, where she shared a “dirty flat” in Portobello Road with Swedish music duo Icona Pop, who would go on to have a global hit in 2012 with I Love It.

“We had no money, there were rats in the kitchen, four girls sharing two rooms, pile of clothes in the middle that we shared.” They were all about to give up; then Vikander got cast in a film in New York and Icona Pop was given a record contract. Some day that flat may have a blue plaque. London is still Vikander’s home — she bought a flat there 18 months ago — although her schedule means she has spent little time there.

Having been linked with her fellow Swede, the chiselled Alexander Skarsgard, Vikander was pictured recently with her arm around Mich­ael Fassbender, her co-star in yet another upcoming film, The Light Between Oceans, based on the novel by Australian writer ML Stedman.

She refuses to comment. “It’s not relevant,” she says firmly, sitting up on the sofa. “Being an actress doesn’t mean I have to discuss my private life.”

She relaxes and sits back when I ask her about Tulip Fever, a forthcoming adaptation of Deborah Moggach’s bestselling novel, set in 17th-century Amsterdam and scripted by Tom Stoppard.

Stoppard likes to work to the last minute, it seems. “We were rehearsing and we had a fax machine on the floor and at 7am new scripts started to roll in. Are we not doing these pages any more? Things I’ve been practising with my dialect coach for the last three weeks?”

Wait, she’s not doing a Dutch accent, is she? No, Vikander smiles, it’s an English one. Even a glutton for punishment has to draw the line somewhere.

The Times