Can two world-famous actors and auteur Simon Stone bring 19th-century Norway screaming into the modern world? They talk mean directors, bathtub revelations and reinventing Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea
At lunch, Vikander is none the worse for a morning spent being shouted at by her fictional spouse: if anything, it seems to have delighted her. This is the first time the 36-year-old Oscar-winner has been in a theatre production since she was a teenager. “On a film the clock is ticking, because you know that you have three scenes in two days. Here it is such a joy because I have these wonderful nerves every day, from still not really understanding what we’re going to do in front of people.”
Her mother, Maria, was a theatre actor, and Vikander herself trained as a ballet dancer: she never even imagined a screen career. “There’s no one saying ‘cut!’, so I really can lose myself in it all. I’m doing the thing I dreamed of as a kid. It’s a real high.” The one thing she was most apprehensive about was whether her voice would reach across the Bridge theatre’s auditorium. Stone reassures her: “You could do a 2,000-seater if you wanted to, Alicia.”…
She looks back with huge gratitude for an upbringing that modelled how a woman could be a fully committed artist and a loving, present mother. “She would get up at 4am to bake bread, because her mum never cooked for her,” she remembers. “And I’ve realised that to be the best mum, I also need to make sure I have this other thing that makes me the person I am.”…