As I mentioned in a previous Alicia Vikander story, Alicia covers the January issue of Vogue. You can see the editorial here – they styled Alicia with baby-bangs throughout, and it’s kind of rough. Her motion looks great, and the clothes are to die for, but the bangs kill it for me. It’s like Vogue was just trying to needle me!! The profile is actually a breezy, no-news-here read, but I still walked away annoyed by her. I can’t exactly put my finger on why though. It’s not any one thing, maybe it’s just a general vibe that she seems very tightly-wound. There’s a whiff of Anne Hathaway about her too. You can read the Vogue interview here, and here are some highlights:
The constant pain of ballet: “I push myself hard. 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.”
The Danish Girl & trans issues: “This was not a film of the ‘now’ when we started making it 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.”
Being asked to have lighter, less “tan” skin: “Two years of films where I had to be white as a ghost. But I’m a real Swede! In fact, I’m a quarter Finnish. Here I go, exploding stereotypes.”
She was in therapy when she was a ballerina: “In ballet school we all had very good grades, 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.”
The fear of celebrity: “I can still go camping with my friends or go on the tube or the bus. 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 rumors that she & Michael Fassbender broke up: She denies the reports, saying, “I always believed there must be some truth to the stuff you read. But I learned.”
There’s Fassbender information sprinkled throughout the cover profile, actually. Maybe that’s what annoys me – she says at various times that she’s not going to talk about her relationship, so she must have gone off-the-record to verify certain pieces of info, just so the words “I’m still dating Michael Fassbender” wouldn’t be attributed to her. It’s a game that some people play, and it’s an annoying game at that. The Vogue writer is the one to say that Michael Fassbender is Alicia’s “real-life boyfriend.” Vogue also has a story from Nicolas Ghesquière (the artistic director of Louis Vuitton, the same one who hired Alicia to be the LV brand-ambassador) where he “recalls his surprise when she pulled up to a photo shoot in Barcelona on the back of Fassbender’s motorcycle.” As for words actually coming out of Fassbender’s mouth, he didn’t speak to Vogue, but he did email one comment, in which he praised her physicality and “the way she embodies her characters from head to toe.” Sure.
Photos courtesy of David Sims/VOGUE.
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