The Oscar winner stars in the HBO series by French auteur Olivier Assayas, based on his 1996 film of the same name, about remaking an iconic work from the silent film era.

How does one remake a remake? The answer still confuses Alicia Vikander.

The actress is currently producing and starring in the new HBO series Irma Vep by director Olivier Assayas, who is recreating his 1996 French film of the same name which featured Maggie Cheung (In the Mood for Love, Hero) in the titular role. Both iterations follow an actress who is cast in a remake of the 1915 silent film serial Les Vampires to play villainess Irma Vep (an anagram for “vampire”), and finds the character rubbing off on her as she delves into the role—and slips into her famous black bodysuit.

Hollywood has churned out many movies about making movies. In fact, it loves them. (See: Mank, Singin’ in the Rain, Hail, Caesar!) But HBO’s Irma Vep takes that self-referential element to a mind-boggling degree. Vikander, an Oscar winner and Tomb Raider star, plays a successful actress, Mira, whose career somewhat mirrors her own. Meanwhile, Vincent Macaigne plays director René Vidal, an analogue for Assayas: René is filming an Irma Vep series with Mira, but has already made Irma Vep, the hit indie film, in the ’90s (referencing Assayas’s 1996 Irma Vep film) with the actress Jade Lee (who represents Cheung). And both of René’s Irma Vep projects are adapted from Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires. Now read that again.

“I even got lost—still get lost—and it gets worse with every episode,” Vikander laughs on the phone, speaking from Paris, where she’s finalizing the last two Irma Vep episodes and meeting with Assayas and members of the crew. “I think that’s the beauty of it,” she adds.

In a time when the entertainment industry feels like one big reboot machine, Irma Vep is refreshing, with its cheeky self-awareness, and at times, self-mockery. It’s almost as if Assayas is saying, “I know how bizarre this all looks.” It doesn’t shy away from the issues with making reboots, either. René voices his insecurities about recreating an iconic work of cinema. Characters discuss whether the story of Irma Vep is fit for a series, whether it’s bingeable, whether it’s too niche for a mainstream audience. “It’s the kind of conversations that I think, especially for people in the film industry, if you’re doing that, that’s what you talk about,” Vikander says. She credits Assayas’s “brilliant mind” for writing a realistic-sounding script. “He writes like people talk.”
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“I feel like I have my armor on,” she said as she readied for the red carpet in a copper column gown.

Alicia Vikander hit the red carpet Sunday evening for the premiere of her upcoming series “Irma Vep” in a custom Louis Vuitton copper column dress, readied as if going into an extremely stylish battle.

“I feel like I have my armor on, a very beautiful Cannes version. I’m excited to see the light hit it when we are on the red carpet,” Vikander told WWD as she dressed in the Louis Vuitton suite minutes ahead of the premiere.

The gown blended two looks from last week’s cruise show in San Diego with warrior cues in copper beading. Created with Nicolas Ghesquière, the pair started on the look as soon as the festival lineup was revealed in mid-April. It took two weeks and over a thousand hours to construct the sculptural gown.

Vikander, who has been an ambassador for Vuitton since 2015, said she has developed not just a creative clothing partnership with Ghesquière but also a friendship.

“The incredible thing is he has such an eye to make beautiful creations and gowns, but he also sees me as a person wearing it. It’s incredible when I get the sketches, it’s defined that he knows me and I can see that,” she said. “The thing with Nicolas is that his own style is very much looking back and honoring classic fashions or styles, honoring those materials and craftsmanship and bringing it out and mixing it up to become something almost ahead of its time,” the actress added.

When she started on the “Irma Vep” project with director Olivier Assayas, she saw some synergy and brought the two together.

“The most exciting thing was that both Olivier and Nicolas, I had separately heard them talking about each other and say that they are fans of one another, so it was one of those things that I was so happy to make sure they met and made that connection,” she said. The result was Ghesquière designing all of the costumes for Vikander’s character in the series.

The series is a remake of Assayas’ own 1996 film “Irma Vep,” which itself is a remake of the 1915 soap opera “Les Vampires” from Louis Feuillade. The new series plays with those contradictions in time as well as toys with the idea of being a movie within a movie, confusing what is real and what is part of the plot.
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The Oscar-winning Swedish actress Alicia Vikander tells Sasha Slater about her unconventional upbringing and playing the ultimate femme fatale

It is a sunny, but bitingly cold, March morning on a quiet side street in Paris. Alicia Vikander, tousled, draped in diamonds, bare-footed and wearing a filmy black negligée, is posing on a rooftop for the Harper’s Bazaar shoot. There are 17 people milling around her holding coffees, warm robes and blusher, including the florist, the make-up artist and the photographer. And everywhere, spring flowers are piled up in drifts, while the stylist teases individual petals on a particularly lush, creamy bloom to get it ready for a close-up. It’s quite a scene.

The next morning, Vikander and I meet in the belle époque splendour of the Salon Proust at the Ritz Paris. She appears alone at precisely 8am, having been awake since six, playing with her one-year-old son. “He’s learning to walk,” she says. “So it’s good there’s carpet everywhere.” I shouldn’t be surprised she’s so punctual. She says she’s never late: “never. My mum was strict about time.”

At 33, Vikander already has an Oscar win under her belt (for The Danish Girl). In the course of her stellar career, she has stepped into Angelina Jolie’s combat boots as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider and has played an android in Ex Machina, the feminist writer Vera Brittain and the political activist Gloria Steinem. Along the way, she fell in love with her now-husband, the Irish-German actor Michael Fassbender; they have been married for five years and have just set up home together in Lisbon.

We are now in France to talk about her latest, and perhaps strangest, role to date: a Sky Atlantic television series called Irma Vep, written and directed by the French filmmaker Olivier Assayas. In it, she plays Mira, an American film star who comes to Paris to act in a remake of Les Vampires, a French silent classic about a criminal gang, whose antiheroine is the wholly amoral, black-catsuited femme fatale Irma Vep (an anagram of vampire).

This show offers a fresh take on Assayas’ cult 1996 film of the same name, which featured the Hong Kong star Maggie Cheung as the actress portraying the villainess. As Vikander says in her (almost) perfect, charmingly transatlantic, English, “it’s so meta, it’s eating itself “. She declines to define what the series is, exactly: melo-drama? Crime caper? Comedy? “I think, while I was making it, I played five roles… It’s like Chinese boxes. There’s always something else going on. I think that’s the beauty of the project.” The series also has a voyeuristic edge, giving a convincing impression of the drama behind the scenes on a struggling film whose director is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
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An enforced pause meant that the globe-hopping, high-achieving Alicia Vikander had the chance to stop and reflect. Now she’s back at work, it’s not all business as usual…

‘I’M IN A GARAGE!’ cries Oscar-winning actor Alicia Vikander. She picks up her laptop and twirls me around on Zoom to prove it. Indeed, she is surrounded by grey concrete pillars and industrial strip lighting in, what I can gather, is a subterranean garage somewhere in Paris. And then she’s back, the camera on her dainty figure with hair scraped back into a ballerina’s bun, revealing tiny white ear buds that wouldn’t have looked out of place on her character Ava, the AI robot she played in Ex Machina.

It’s not her garage. She’s on set for the ELLE cover shoot, but Vikander is perfectly happy with the set-up. After all, she says, this is her first day back at work after several months.

As coronavirus shuttered the world, Vikander was stuck in France where she’d attended Paris Fashion Week, sitting front row at Louis Vuitton – a brand she’s been an ambassador of for five years. With European borders rapidly closing, she escaped the capital city to her holiday house near a small farming village in rural France, where she spent most of lockdown holed up with her husband, the actor Michael Fassbender.

The Zoom calls she took there, for work and to catch up with family, had a slightly more homely background than the one she’s framed by now, with a bookshelf and a window looking out onto greenery. I ask whether there was ever, you know, any risk of Fassbender walking past the window unsuspectingly while she was on a call. It’s not happened thus far… ‘But that’s the thing when you’re in your house,’ she laughs. ‘There’s always a risk of someone in the background. My husband was often around making coffee or putting the boiler on,’ she says, giving a rare domestic insight into the life of one of Hollywood’s starriest, but famously private, couples.

However cosy the set up in France sounds – and it does sound idyllic, with trips to the market, grilled fish cooked on the BBQ, impromptu dancing in the kitchen and virtual poker nights with her family – her enthusiasm for being back at work is palpable. Continue reading  »