Alicia Vikander Wants the Full Venice Experience

Alicia Vikander has opted not to watch the final cut of The Echo Chamber yet.

“Especially in Venice — that room is so special,” begins the Swedish actress about waiting to watch it with an audience on the Lido. “So I was like, ‘I might just give myself that experience’… I’ve never had it.”

She is no stranger to the Venice Film Festival, having premiered a slew of movies here, including last year’s The Wizard of the Kremlin. But Vikander, the Oscar-winning star of The Danish Girl, Ex Machina and who did a mean Lara Croft in 2018’s Tomb Raider reboot, is eager to share her authentic reaction to Andrea Pallaoro’s fourth feature with the rest of us. “Terrifying!” she admits.

Vikander is calling from Spain. She’s on a sailing holiday with her family, though admittedly feels a little under the weather, having caught an illness from her two young children (she married German-Irish star Michael Fassbender in 2017). “We’re back on land now,” she chuckles, her voice ever so slightly hoarse.

Accustomed to choppy waters, it’s no surprise Vikander was game for Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, charting the love story between her character, Anne, and Leo, played by Italian actor Luca Marinelli. Set in London (but filmed in Rome; Pallaoro ordered that the apartment’s wall-spanning windows be swapped for English ones), the pair are caught in an endless cycle of longing, separation, intimacy and distance.

Pallaoro, directing Bernardo Bertolucci’s final screenplay before his 2018 death, deftly cuts and chops the timeline, blending The Echo Chamber into an unchronological depiction of dependency. Susan Sarandon co-stars in a supporting role as Ava, a fellow musician and creative partner of Leo’s.

Vikander first met the Italian filmmaker at a years-ago edition of the Marrakech Film Festival. “We were both getting an award and standing backstage,” she recalls. “We were so nervous because [Martin] Scorsese was out there, and we were like, ‘Oh my god, congratulations to you!’ We saw each other’s films, and we actually got to know each other. So it’s been a friendship that’s built over the years, and [I’ve] become a real fan.” Already keen to work together, things progressed pretty expeditiously when Vikander learnt of Marinelli’s involvement in Pallaoro’s upcoming project. “I’ve seen his films too, and think he’s an extraordinary actor. And then I found out that he would love to do it with me,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter.

The duo was quickly able to build a convincing rapport — a portrait of two people trapped by infatuation — thanks to a neat shooting schedule, despite the mixed-up script. “We tried to shoot as much as possible in chronological order, just to stay on track and keep the evolution of the relationship authentic,” explains Vikander.

But her first reaction to the script? That it was fairly elusive. “It was already set in these different timelines, which almost [makes it] a mystery,” she says. “I actually did map out the script in chronological order, and that gave me a very different sense of what I was acting and gave me another view of my character and streamlined certain things. I haven’t seen the final film,” she reminds us, “but I know [Pallaoro] has moved around scenes.”

She quickly fell in love with the director’s “mise-en-scène” style of filmmaking — how he creates “spaces and rooms and lets that be as much of a character in the film as Bertolucci does.” Leo and Anne’s London home, in The Echo Chamber, embodies a complex psychology. “[Pallaoro] is not trying to explain it,” she says, “but trying to show it… He’s a filmmaker who cares about his actors and cares about performance.” This gave Vikander and Marinelli the freedom to use the space and do what they do best: play.

As a title, The Echo Chamber captures the result of that spontaneity, with Leo and Anne making decisions that will reverberate for the rest of their lives. “It’s all these events and memories, the things in rooms that make you relive moments and [remain] stuck in patterns, and how hard it can be to recreate yourself or change others,” says Vikander. “That is, at the core, very much what this film is.”

Soon into the film, we are privy to a pattern that Leo and Anne can’t seem to pull themselves out of. Without revealing any major spoilers, THR asks the actress if the characters love each other in the same way. She laughs as she works through her answer. “I don’t even know what love is [when it comes] to them. When I played it, those feelings were true. But looking at it, I’m like, ‘I don’t know if that’s love.’ I would question both their attraction and seeking in somebody else. It’s quite complex.”

Complex could be an understatement — The Echo Chamber is bound to challenge audiences, particularly with its topsy-turvy timeline. Thank goodness for a straight-talking Ava in Sarandon, who anchors the proceedings with her savoir-faire. “[I am] such an incredible fan,” says Vikander about the U.S. star. “I only had about two scenes with her, but I was very excited to meet her and get to know her over dinners in Rome.”

And while Ava’s relationship with Leo is built around their mutual love of music, Anne’s passions are trickier to pin down. “She feels very far away from myself,” admits Vikander. “But I think what I love about films is, because I am using my own emotions and my own tools, then suddenly it’s totally believable and easy, even when it could lead your character into the most terrible or morally wrong decisions. [With] humans, it all comes from somewhere. And if you get the truth, it can always surprise you how easy it is to understand something.”

At this point in her career, truth is Vikander’s north star. She already has a coveted Academy Award on her mantel, leaving her with the will to explore an industry brimming with bold voices. “I love brave filmmaking,” she says when asked what kind of roles speak to her these days. “Andrea has this poetry to his films that I think is quite extraordinary. When I see a filmmaker’s work and I get curious, I wonder what those rooms are like, working with these creatives.”

For example, she says, she’s shooting a Netflix series adaptation of André Aciman’s bestselling novel Enigma Variations, directed by Oliver Hermanus, as we speak. “It’s [about] people that I really admire and want to work with,” continues Vikander. “[Echo Chamber] is obviously in the genre and a very arthouse film, but it doesn’t matter [if] I’m doing a Netflix series. It’s the same fundamental reasons why I chose to do that as why I did Echo Chamber.”

Romance drama Enigma Variations co-stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Riley Keough and Sarah Pidgeon. “It’s based on a book [from] the same author of Call Me by Your Name, and it’s very exciting,” says Vikander, who plays Claire. “The streamers are now actually daring to put money in, to me, adult drama. This is a film that is very hard to make right now, but we’re getting a chance to do that in a bit of a longer version [eight one-hour episodes] for streamers. So everything is continuously evolving,” she adds about staying optimistic in a rapidly changing industry. “I want to stay positive and think that there is a place for these kinds of stories.”

Hermanus is not the only filmmaking hero of Vikander’s that she’s worked with this year, but the actress is tight-lipped about who else she’s been collaborating with — for now. From September, it’s all eyes on The Echo Chamber‘s Lido debut, a prospect that never fails to thrill this Venice vet: “Just being [there] adds to the wonderful fantasy of the history of films and the people that have been there before,” she giggles. “You can step into that and go into your little boat across the canal.”

“Cannes is so special and wonderful, but the thing is, it’s also a big market,” says Vikander. “Venice is truly just a film festival.”