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.
