WASHINGTON — Most actresses would be thrilled for even one Golden Globe nomination.
However, the insanely gifted Alicia Vikander is up for not one, but two Globes on Sunday for her work in Alex Garland’s sci-fi thriller “Ex Machina” and Tom Hooper’s period drama “The Danish Girl.”
“I was very surprised. … I was in Berlin and came out from a big roundtable with journalists, and my publicist told me the news. We were just heading off to the airport so I was jumping in my seat. She told me one first, and I had this crazy reaction, and then she told me that there was a second one, and I just stopped. I was like, ‘What?’ I couldn’t really get my head around that,” Vikander tells WTOP.
Sunday night, Vikander will vie for Best Lead Actress against Cate Blanchett (“Carol”), Brie Larson (“Room”), Rooney Mara (“Carol”) and Saoirse Ronan (“Brooklyn”), as well as Best Supporting Actress against Jane Fonda (“Youth”), Jennifer Jason Leigh (“The Hateful Eight”), Helen Mirren (“Trumbo”) and Kate Winslet (“Steve Jobs”). Talk about a list of Hollywood heavy hitters.
“I don’t think I could have ever even associated my name with these kind of awards or the people that I was nominated next to,” Vikander says of her 2016 class of nominees.
It’s been a wild rise to cinema’s upper echelon. Born in Gothenburg, Sweden, Vikander began her career in short films and TV series, including the hit Swedish TV drama “Andra Avenyn.” In 2011, she won a “Shooting Star” award at the Berlin International Film Festival before starring across Keira Knightley in “Anna Karenina” (2012) and Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Fifth Estate” (2013).
But it was her performance in the Danish flick “A Royal Affair” (2012) — Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language Film — that caught the eye of “Ex Machina” filmmaker Alex Garland.
“This young girl is sort of owning the movie in some respects, and carrying these scenes on her shoulders (in ‘A Royal Affair’). It’s always striking when you see that, so I knew she was an amazing actress. We spoke and she reacted the script. She said some extremely perceptive things, and she put her reading of herself down on tape, and it was a kind of slam dunk,” Garland tells WTOP.
In “Ex Machina,” she plays Ava, a cutting-edge robot of artificial intelligence developed by a mad scientist (Oscar Isaac) in a remote bunker. He recruits a loner (Domhnall Gleeson) to see if he can tell the difference in a creepy, sexy and ultimately thought-provoking study of human identity.
“It’s a film that puts a lot of pressure on actors. First and foremost, we just needed top, quality actors. Once we had that, then I tried to give as much autonomy to the actors as possible to sort of inhabit the part. Alicia came up with a bunch of ideas about Ava … the way she’d move, which would not be robotic, it would be a kind of ‘too perfect’ version of the way humans move,” Garland tells WTOP.
“If a human doesn’t know he’s interacting with a computer, the test is passed,” Isaac tells Gleeson, referring to the so-called Turing Test, named after Alan Turing of “The Imitation Game” (2014). Just as Knightley stayed married to Cumberbatch’s closet homosexual character in that movie, Vikander’s character similarly helps Eddie Redmayne through a gender identity crisis in “The Danish Girl.”
“I approached the films very differently. I did ‘Ex Machina’ two and a half years ago, and ‘Danish Girl’ we actually just finished in April of this year, so it was quite a bit in between. But it was interesting when I met some trans-women two or three weeks ago after seeing ‘Ex Machina’ and wanted to point out that they had found such connection in how the Ava character also tries to find the truth of wanting to embody the person that she believes she is,” Vikander says.
Based on real-life Danish artists Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener, “The Danish Girl” is set in 1926 Copenhagen, as Gerda (Vikander) faces a deadline on her next painting and asks her husband (Redmayne) to stand in as a female model. To both their surprise, the husband actually enjoys the cross dressing and decides to undergo the world’s first gender-reassignment surgery, a decision that has complex ramifications on their marriage and proves that true love knows no bounds.
“This was a time when there was no reference of this or even vocabulary to express what Lili goes through. It’s that thing of knowing someone so purely, so fully, someone that you love that much. … What I thought was remarkable with this story was of course that they were such pioneers … but also to see a marriage and a love relationship when it’s all about if you are actually truly loved by somebody unconditionally then maybe you can dare to become yourself, to be yourself,” she says.
Not only did Vikander work with the reigning Oscar champ Redmayne (“The Theory of Everything”), she also go to work with a visionary director in Hooper (“The King’s Speech,” “Les Miserables”).
Throughout, Hooper finds visual ways to express his themes, showing Redmayne and Vikander through symbolic windows, placing dresses in Redmayne’s foreground as foreshadowing, using apartment walls and door frames to elicit the couple’s growing emotional separation, and presenting their apartment in gorgeous compositions that look like something out of Vikander’s paintings.
“When we did rehearsals, we had set up those spaces … so we could play with space. … If you’re in different rooms, it’s like experimenting. Trying how it is to sit close to each other saying something, or have an enormous distance, but each turns a scene on its head. … Some of it was even in the script.”
What does Vikander look for in a script?
“It’s when I don’t think about reading a script. It’s very rare. It’s difficult to write a script which takes you on a similar journey of feeling like you’re reading a book or watching a film. Both ‘Ex Machina’ and ‘Danish Girl’ were two of those scripts where suddenly I was on the last page! And I was like, ‘Wow,’ and then you know it’s good,” she says.
But even the best scripts require the right directorial touch. What does she look for in a director?
“Both Alex and Tom … You know they’re always there as a safety net when you need help and also push you, which is scary. … You always have questions and you always want to know and hear a director’s vision, but it’s pretty empowering when they actually tell you … ‘Try it out first. Go with your instincts,’ and then we can work from that and discover new things,” Vikander says.
This preparation — and execution — certainly paid off for Vikander, who will wait to see if her name is called when two envelopes are opened Sunday at the Globes. And just like every year, a potential Globe win could pave the way for Oscar glory, either for “Ex Machina” or “The Danish Girl.”
“It’s been two films that I’ve been so happy to have been involved in, two very different films with two very different extraordinary parts,” Vikander says. “I’m just extremely fortunate to have been invited to be on the journeys of making these stories.”
