Fever Pitch

After shooting onto Hollywood’s radar just a few years ago, the incomparably talented, laser-focused Alicia Vikander has already snagged an Oscar, slayed Michael Fassbender, and dominated the indie drama beat. Now—as her latest period film, Tulip Fever, hits theaters— she’s training those transfixing brown eyes on a new set of challenges, including a little franchise called Tomb Raider.

- Ben Dickinson

With a conspiratorial grin and utterly without fanfare, Alicia Vikander slips into the seat opposite me at Ham Yard, a festive, airplane hangar–size hotel restaurant tucked away on a cul-de-sac of the same name in London’s West End. The always-voracious tabloid press has been fed hardly any paparazzi photos of Vikander, 28, and her A-list beau, Michael Fassbender, 40, since the previous fall, and she’s clearly on high alert. She’d reserved our table under an amusing pseudonym and arrives dressed in matte black from head to toe: a long-sleeve pullover, pants, and a coat by the Swedish designer Carin Rodebjer—the stealth technology of modern urban invisibility personified. Sans makeup, hair unfussily pulled back, Vikander looks to be all business—albeit, as her warm brown eyes promise, engagingly so. She’ll spend the next two hours talking enthusiastically, almost like the collegian she might have been not long ago, without the slightest trace of pretense about her work, which she clearly loves and which seems to consume her entire being with an almost frightening intensity. When I ask her if she wants a drink, she demurs. “I haven’t been drinking for eight months—I’m going to drink tomorrow. I’ll be the cheapest date you ever had!”