Do we like Alicia Vikander?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record and sensible public statements, but the sources we could open show little charity or activism, so it stops short of the top end.
Alicia Vikander grew up in Gothenburg and wanted to be a ballerina. She went on to study at the Royal Swedish Ballet School in Stockholm, until injuries ended her dance career in her teens. She then turned to acting, with Swedish short films and the TV drama Andra Avenyn.
Her international breakthrough came in 2012 with Anna Karenina and A Royal Affair. A Golden Globe nomination for playing the robot Ava in Ex Machina followed. She then won Best Supporting Actress at the 2016 Oscars for The Danish Girl, the first Swede to take an acting Oscar since Ingrid Bergman in 1974.
The closest thing to a stoush in her career is The Danish Girl, where a cisgender man, Eddie Redmayne, played a trans woman. She has said she understood the criticism and that the industry needs to change so trans actors get work. She also said making the film was a learning experience.
More recently she went further, saying the film already feels extremely dated. She called that a good thing, and said the film at least got trans lives discussed. For a straight-down-the-line Oscar winner, that is a pleasingly unbothered answer rather than a defensive one.
On the harm test, we found nothing: no culture-war posts, no conspiracy rabbit holes, no dodgy company. Her recent work is serious cinema, including playing Gloria Steinem in The Glorias, and in 2020 she talked about the challenge of finding your own voice. Searches for Trump, climate or vaccine statements came up empty, so we can't say more than that.
The recent news is Hope, Na Hong-jin's 160-minute alien-invasion creature feature, which premiered at Cannes in May 2026. Vikander has said she became a fan of Na's work when she first went to the Busan film festival at 21. He later came back to her saying he had some alien characters. The reception was split, but it is a big swing.