The 2001 movie that changed Alicia Vikander’s life forever: “Kind of changed my path”
We like to crown actors as the kings and queens of things for some reason, but for the purposes of talking about Alicia Vikander today, I think it’s a perfectly acceptable thing to do to describe her as the current queen of sci-fi.
And this can be backed up by actual, proper evidence, rather than just saying it and hoping you’ll agree. After all, back in 2014, she announced herself to the world via Alex Garland’s frankly terrifyingly prescient thriller Ex Machina, playing Ava, the artificial intelligence humanoid created by Oscar Isaac’s narcissistic tech CEO, and was so good right out of the gate that she duly collected a Golden Globe nomination.
The very next year, the Swede went one better and picked up an Academy Award for The Danish Girl opposite Eddie Redmayne, but that isn’t sci-fi, so we’ll ignore that for now. Her first really big lead role was in 2018’s Tomb Raider, which saw her effortlessly slip into Lara Croft’s shorts to jump and swing about the place in the video game adaptation, which slightly underwhelmed the critics but nevertheless almost trebled its budget at the box office.
Perhaps her most interesting and most overlooked piece of sci-fi was the brilliant 2024 film The Assessment opposite Elizabeth Olsen, a movie that saw both leading women give astonishing performances in the story of a couple in a dystopian future trying to win the right to have a baby.
While Vikander had undoubtedly done some great work on screen in the past, this was a truly ‘leave it all on the field’ moment that saw her playing the unhinged assessor of the couple, who visits them, stays with them, and then completely tears them apart.
It was the kind of performance she may well have channelled an actor and a film that she loved from a young age, as she told Bafta, “One of the first films that I saw that I probably shouldn’t have seen when I was younger was [2001 erotic drama] The Piano Teacher. That’s also the film that made me want to act, strangely enough”.
“Isabelle Huppert is absolutely incredible in that film…it was definitely one that kind of changed my path, I think.”
Alicia Vikander
There are certainly some shared themes and influences between The Piano Teacher and The Assessment. Both films show people driven to their limit by repressive surroundings and relationships, and in the case of French actor Huppert, playing a piano teacher who embarks on an illicit relationship with her student, a woman who, like Vikander’s character in the later film, begins as a composed professional and ends as a defeated, hollow mess.
While Vikander was nominated for ‘Best Lead Actress’ for The Assessment at the British Independent Film Awards, it might well be that she’s saved her best slice of sci-fi for later this year. September will see the release of Hope, the South Korean epic from director Na Hong-jin, the recently released trailer for which had jaws dropping all over the internet.
Vikander stars in the movie alongside her husband, Michael Fassbender, in the story of a police chief trying to protect the residents of his rural island from a mysterious, terrifying creature.
