HEROINE CHIC
Tomb Raider for a new generation
Almost 20 years ago, a 10-yearold Swedish girl named Alicia Vikander attended a sleepover at her best friend’s house. She heard a clamour from the next room and decided to investigate.
“I walked into a room at a friend’s house and saw that a group of older boys were playing Tomb Raider,” the Oscar-winning actress recalled. “I had never seen a female protagonist in a computer game, so I stood behind them watching and eventually asked, ‘Can I give it a try?’
“They wouldn’t allow me,” Vikander said. “They said videogames were for boys. I had to stay awake and sneak downstairs, later that night, where I discovered Lara Croft for the first time. I couldn’t believe it. She was so strong and in command.
“I wanted to be her when I grew up.”
The actress, now 29, has managed the next-best thing: She plays Lara in the new, big-screen Tomb Raider. When the film hits cinemas next week, somewhere in the world, those now-grown-up Swedish boys will have a chance to realise how wrong they were.
On a cool winter morning at a hotel in Beverly Hills, California, Vikander was poised and cool in leather trousers and a white, ruffled shirt, her dark hair pulled into a neat side ponytail. She looked little like Lara, who is almost always bruised, battered and streaked with dirt.
She wasn’t even grunting.
“It’s such a stupid thing,” Vikander said, blushing, “but when I would jump off a rock or hurl my body off a sinking boat while playing Lara Croft, I’d grunt. I was suddenly an action hero. You leave your independent-movie past in the dust and find yourself going, ‘Uh! Oh! Ha!’
“Is that normal?”
She laughed. It’s normal under the circumstances.
Tomb Raider finds a young Lara growing up at Croft Manor in England. When her father (Dominic West), an artifact collector and treasure hunter, goes missing and is presumed dead, Lara must toughen up. She gets a day job as a bike messenger and, at night, works out her frustrations with martial arts.
However, when evidence that her father might still be alive turns up, Lara sets out to find him, which leads to a quest to thwart a powerful demonic curse.
Vikander was shocked to get the call to step into the shoes of Angelina Jolie, who starred in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001).
“I didn’t say ‘what?’ — I said, ‘WHAT?’ I couldn’t believe it,” she recalled. “I was told that I was right for it, because it was based on the 2013 rebooted game and would be a very, very different take on the story.” Vikander was intrigued.
“She’s an iconic character who has been with us for 22 years,” the actress explained. “She’s a bold, curious, badass being. I figured that I would have a lot of fun trying to find the core of her and her personality.”
Her Lara Croft doesn’t start with the swagger fans of the game may expect.
“It’s a coming-of-age story,” Vikander said. “She’s a young woman who is still trying to find her footing in the world. Her father has been lost for years and she hasn’t been able to mourn him, because no one knows what happened to him.
“Lara must go out into the world with all the skills that she has in her,” she continued, “and really use them when her life is challenged. She has to go through so much to become the action hero we know her to be.”
Vikander identified with the theme of finding your calling.
“Lara must come to an acceptance of who she is,” the actress said. “She has always had this love for history, mythology and artefacts, but is that her calling? I think any young person can relate. She’s at that age when she’s asking, ‘What am I going to do with my life? Is it good enough?’
“I remember that pressure in my 20s.” In most of her films, Vikander has a glamorous presence. That wasn’t the case with Tomb Raider.
“I walked into the makeup trailer for the first time to get into Lara Croft mode and we had a lengthy laceration discussion,” she recalled. “There were about 42 stages of wounds.”
Then there were the stunts, notably including an escape scene in which Lara dangles precariously over a rushing river, clinging to a dilapidated Japanese bomber.
“It was inspired by the game,” Vikander said. “There I was, on an airplane, wing spinning 180 degrees. This culminated in me being thrown down an Olympic rafting course. I did that about 25 times with my hands tied behind my back.”
Her work on the film began with four months of rigorous training, six or seven days a week, long before the cameras rolled.
“You needed to buy that this young woman could beat up far bigger, stronger men,” she said. “She’s a strong girl, and I needed to prove it.”
Game fans looking for Lara’s trademark double pistols will be disappointed. This is a younger Lara who relies on her fists and occasionally a bow and arrow.
“She doesn’t use a gun in this film,” Vikander said. “She uses everything else, down to an ice pick, as a weapon. This is someone who really needs to be innovative and use what’s around her. She also uses her wit and intelligence.”
It was all a new experience for the actress, whose previous films have been longer on talk than on action.
“There was a day when I was on a big boat, with cannons of water being shot in my face and big wind machines knocking me down,” she said with a laugh. “I was in my tank top, just getting pummelled. There I was, sliding down a slick boat deck, thinking, ‘What am I doing?’”
She was doing what Jolie did in 2001 and again in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life (2003).
“Angelina made Lara Croft into a film icon,” Vikander said. “I remember seeing the first film when it came out. It was one of the first times I had seen a female action hero who really took care of business. It was thrilling.
“What’s exciting is that the character has evolved,” she added. “I think Lara Croft morphs into a different version of herself due to the time she’s in.”
The daughter of psychiatrist Svante Vikander and actress Maria Fahl-Vikander, she grew up as one of six children in Gothenburg, Sweden. She studied ballet, first at the Royal Swedish Ballet School in Stockholm and then at the School of American Ballet in New York, but an injury led her to abandon dancing and start over as an actress.
“I moved into a dingy flat with three of my Swedish girlfriends,” Vikander recalled, “and, the first day, I opened up the kitchen door and screamed because I had never seen rats in my life.”
She didn’t panic.
“I closed that door and moved our kitchen table into the corridor,” Vikander said. “We ate our dinners out there.”
Short films in her native country led to television work, notably on the popular series Second Avenue (2007-2008). She made her feature-film debut in Pure (2010), and her
international debut in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (2012), which led to A Royal Affair (2012), Hotel (2013), The Fifth Estate (2013) and Testament of Youth (2014). Her breakthrough came as a sexy android in Ex Machina (2015), an international hit for which she paid with hours of suffering.
“It was a one-piece suit,” Vikander explained. “And then we had to contend with the top of my head, which was four-and-a-half hours each day in the makeup chair. I’d get to set in the wee morning hours, fall asleep in the makeup chair and wake up looking like a robot.”
The success of Ex Machina led to The Man
from U.N.C.L.E. (2015), Jason Bourne (2016) and The Light Between Oceans (2016), not
to mention The Danish Girl (2015), which earned Vikander an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actress for her performance as painter Gerda Wegener, wife of transgender pioneer Einar Wegener (Eddie Redmayne).
“When I was a young girl, growing up in Sweden, I used to set my alarm for 2am to watch the Oscars with my mom,” Vikander said, grinning. “Sitting at the Oscars in this gorgeous dress, with my mom next to me, was quite surreal. I was holding her hand when they announced my name.
“That moment proved what my parents always told me, which was simply, ‘You can do it.’”
The Light Between Oceans won Vikander something she treasures even more than her Oscar: co-star Michael Fassbender, whom she married in 2017. The two now live in Portugal.
He’s German-Irish and she’s Swedish, and they’re both American movie stars. Why Portugal?
“It’s so peaceful,” Vikander said. “I’m a blue-jeans type who likes to just hang out at home. We also adore Portugal because my husband loves to swim in the ocean.”
Don’t be surprised to see them together again onscreen, if the right role comes along.
“I loved working with Michael,” Vikander said. “He has proven himself as one of the bravest of actors. I just want to keep doing what I’m doing now, while holding onto the idea that a lot of things are possible.”
What’s exciting is that the character has evolved. Lara Croft morphs into a different version of herself due to the time she’s in.
ALICIA VIKANDER