“This is the part she’s been dying to play.” Starring Alicia Vikander and Directed by Olivier Assayas, #IrmaVep premieres Monday June 6 on @ HBOMax.

I added the new photoshoot that Alicia Vikander did for Harper’s Bazaar. You can go to the gallery and enjoy the photos!

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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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Alicia Vikander (Blue Bayou) is replacing Michelle Williams as Queen Catherine Parr in the royal thriller Firebrand from Brazilian helmer Karim Ainouz (The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão), Deadline has confirmed. She’ll star alongside Jude Law, who is set to portray King Henry VIII.

Ainousz’s first English-language feature, based on Elizabeth Fremantle’s bestselling historical novel Queen’s Gambit, centers on Parr—Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife, who was the only one to avoid banishment or death.

By the time young Catherine Parr (Vikander) married the deteriorating, increasingly despotic King Henry VIII (Law), she had no assurances of a happy marriage; in fact, she had no assurances of surviving this marriage at all. Of her predecessors, two were thrown out, one died in childbirth and two were beheaded. While Catherine tried to keep her head about her to navigate the politics of her position, she brought a secret agenda. She was Protestant, believed it her duty to marry Henry, for it would be the only position in which she could convert him – and the kingdom – from his pro-Catholic position. That faith was tested when the church resisted granting his divorce from his first wife so he could marry Anne Boleyn, who would later be beheaded. With arrests, torture, and executions of Protestants on the rise, Catherine invited a dangerous game that would leave one of them dead before long. The thriller is told through Catherine’s singular point-of-view of the psychological horror of living with a monster—and the remarkable will to not only survive, but thrive.

Killing Eve‘s Jessica Ashworth and Henrietta Ashworth adapted the script, with Brouhaha Entertainment producing.

Vikander is perhaps best known for her Oscar-winning turn in Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl, and for her portrayal of the humanoid A.I. Ava in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, which had her starring opposite Oscar Isaac. The actress recently wrapped production on Olivier Assayas’ limited series Irma Vep for A24 and HBO which is set to debut this fall, and most recently appeared in Justin Chon’s Blue Bayou for Focus Features, and David Lowery’s The Green Knight for A24. She has also appeared in films including The Glorias, Tomb Raider, Submergence, Tulip Fever, The Light Between Oceans, Jason Bourne, Burnt, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Testament of Youth, The Fifth Estate and Anna Karenina, among others. [Source]

I added the new photoshoot that Alicia Vikander did for Madame Figaro. You can go to the gallery and enjoy the photos!

If you like the site and want to help to keep this online, please, feel free to go here to donate. I really need help to maintain the site. Every little bit helps! Thanks for all.