Alicia Vikander, the actress who won the Oscar before cinema decided it was a mistake

The last thing Alicia Vikander said publicly about The Danish Girl was that it already feels “extremely dated.” She was the one who won the Oscar for it.

That is the specific friction inside her career: a decade of building on a foundation she helped construct, then doing the work of publicly examining it before anyone could accuse her of silence. Most actors who win the Academy Award do not spend the following ten years encouraging audiences to look harder at what the award was for. Vikander does.

She was not originally meant to be an actress. She began training in ballet at nine, first at Svenska Balettskolan in Gothenburg, then at the Royal Swedish Ballet’s upper school in Stockholm, where she moved alone at fifteen. The discipline clarified something: she wanted authorship that ballet did not offer. She was twice rejected by acting schools, had already been accepted to law school, and was cast as the lead in Pure only at the last moment—the kind of accident that, in retrospect, looks inevitable.

Pure (2010), directed by Lisa Langseth, won her the Guldbagge Award for Best Actress—Sweden’s leading film prize. Two years later, A Royal Affair, a Danish film in which she played Queen Caroline Mathilde opposite Mads Mikkelsen, introduced her to European cinema at scale. Joe Wright, who cast her in Anna Karenina after seeing Pure, noted her ability to hold complexity in stillness. By 2012, she was working simultaneously in Swedish, English, and Danish productions.

The collaboration with Alex Garland changed the register. In Ex Machina (2014), she played Ava, an artificial intelligence designed to test whether the man observing her will help her escape or report her. The role required her to move as though the body were executing a program, while acting as though the programming concealed something alive. The Academy placed her in the supporting category—a classification that film critics still dispute.

The Danish Girl, which followed the next year, brought the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She played Gerda Wegener, the artist married to Lili Elbe, played by Eddie Redmayne. The film’s initial reception was admiring; the decade since has been considerably more complicated. The central casting choice—a cisgender man playing one of the first documented transgender women to undergo gender reassignment surgery—became a reference point in ongoing debates about representation in film. In early 2025, Vikander did not wait for the debate to come for her. She told British Vogue the film “already feels extremely dated,” and added: “I totally understand the criticism that has been out there, because we need to make change and we need to make sure that trans men and women actually get a foot in and get work.” For an Oscar winner to publicly contextualize—and partly interrogate—the film that made her name is unusual enough to be worth noting.

The decade after The Danish Girl produced one of the stranger trajectories in recent Hollywood. Jason Bourne placed her inside a major franchise; the 2018 Tomb Raider reboot placed her at its center. Neither established a lasting franchise. Tomb Raider received divided reviews—critics consistently separated Vikander’s committed, physically specific performance from the film itself, which MGM eventually conceded by allowing the rights to lapse before a sequel could be made. She was working inside systems that turned out to be smaller than she was.

Her mother, Maria Fahl—a Swedish stage actress whose decades of theater work shaped Vikander’s orientation toward the craft—died in December 2022 in Portugal. In the years since, Vikander has moved toward more adventurous material: Irma Vep (2022), Olivier Assayas’s HBO series reworking of his own 1996 film; Rumours (2024), Guy Maddin’s horror-comedy alongside Cate Blanchett; The Assessment (2024), a science fiction thriller. The pattern is consistent—directors with singular visions over studios with franchise plans.

She has two young sons with actor Michael Fassbender, whom she married in 2017 and whom she met on the set of The Light Between Oceans in 2016. The 2026 slate is the most varied of her career: Na Hong-Jin’s science fiction film Hope, shot in South Korea alongside Fassbender, Hoyeon, and Taylor Russell; The Last Day, directed by Rachel Rose; The Echo Chamber, from a script associated with Bernardo Bertolucci. She has also committed to The Lady from the Sea, an Ibsen adaptation directed by Simon Stone—which would mark her first major stage work in London.

Alicia Vikander’s next decade has different coordinates than the one she has just completed—less awards season, more risk, and a conspicuous willingness to publicly reframe what the first decade meant. She remains one of the very few figures in contemporary cinema capable of sustaining both the arthouse and the blockbuster simultaneously, not because she has found a way to reconcile them, but because she keeps choosing the version of each that the other cannot quite replicate.

Tags: Michael Fassbender