At first blush, Swedish-born Alicia Vikander couldn’t be further from her latest character. In Justin Chon’s soulful indie Blue Bayou, she plays Kathy—a Southern nurse expecting a child with her New-Orleans-raised, South Korea-born husband Antonio (played by Chon). The couple’s existence is rocked when Antonio is taken into ICE custody and threatened with imminent deportation to the country he hasn’t even visited since he was a child.
It was the exact contrast between Vikander and Kathy, and her desire to find their similarities, that made Blue Bayou such an exciting project. The film, in theaters Sept. 17, also serves as a reminder to Vikander about why she fell in love with filmmaking. “This has obviously been such a tough year for so many people around the world, but for me, it made me not work for a year, which hasn’t happened in, well, my entire career,” Vikander tells VF’s Katey Rich about working post-pandemic. “In one way that break made me be able to stop and really reflect over why I love doing this and make me miss it. It’s a job that reinvents itself and becomes new for each day, which makes it so alive and giving.”
On this week’s Little Gold Men, Vikander opens up about shooting on-location in Louisiana, building a connection with her onscreen daughter, and changing her career trajectory after winning an Oscar for in 2016. The episode also contains Oscars and Emmys race updates, along with a special farewell to longtime LGM co-host Joanna Robinson.
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Read a partial transcript of the Alicia Vikander interview below.
My colleague talked to Justin Chon about Blue Bayou a little while ago before it was at Cannes. He talked about how he felt so confident in your ability to take on this role that is, as far as we know, pretty removed from your own personal experience. So when he came to you with that confidence, how did you feel about it? Did you look at this role and say, “Yes, this is something I can absolutely do”?
Well, it’s also one of those things where it is very different from any role that has been presented to me. And it was a small film, but it was because of that I was very intrigued to do it. When I began my career, it was interesting, I was in America and because I had played maybe a royal or a princess, or had a bit of a British accent because I lived there for a while, people assume that I come from an upper-class background and that’s not really the case. I’m more of a working-class background in a small town in Sweden.
It was definitely a family story there that I totally could relate to and I love the fact that Justin didn’t question that at all. Actually, the whole crew itself [didn’t question it]. I think we counted the amount of countries we had in front of the camera and behind. And not a lot of Americans actually played the parts in the film when you think about it. So, I love that it was so multicultural and [Justin] said himself, “I believe that to understand Americans sometimes it’s even a good thing to have a bit of distance.” And I think that’s true with any culture.
When you step into a film that’s such an intimate story, made on this low-scale, do you feel like you bring more of yourself into it? Does it ask something of you more so than a larger production?
I tend to want to bring as much of myself in any project that I take on, but I do love filmmaking, and filmmaking on a very small scale becomes only that. What I mean is that if you get a bigger budget, it’s a lot more people and a lot of things that can’t go wrong. When you have a small budget, you have to sometimes wing things. You have a very small group of people that come together, but a group that clearly wants to do this and believes and loves this project, it becomes very intimate. You become a very close group of people that try to make things against a lot of odds. And that brings a very powerful and beautiful vibe. The fact that you change costumes in a bathroom, somewhere in a gas station, and then you go out and you shoot, and then you see light somewhere and you run with a camera and two camera crew and you shoot something…I love that thing of it being a bit of guerrilla filmmaking in a way.
I don’t want to give away where the story goes, but the very end of the movie is very super intensely emotional. Do you do something to build up to that as a family unit on screen to make the emotions of a scene like that come across properly?
We shot that scene right in the end. By that point, we had a quite close relationship naturally between us. So it was very easy to just rely on that. Not have to come into that scene with too much thought or intention and instead just be in the moment and let it play out what feels the most natural.
Do you feel like you can walk away from it when you’re done with something like that, or does it linger with you?
If you have a cry in a scene, I don’t know, I can’t fake cry. I don’t know what that is. And when someone says “cut” it’s not like that just goes away in a heartbeat. It’s like a physical reaction that is still ongoing in your body and is being released. So physically, it takes a bit then to calm down. I think every actor is very different, but I’m the kind of person who I love going very deep with my character on set, but then the joy is that I can try and let that go and be me afterwards.
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