Alicia Vikander was very excited when Harvey Weinstein took an interest in her
I saw The Man From UNCLE this weekend and I surprisingly enjoyed it… a lot. It’s very a very pretty film, possibly Guy Ritchie’s most beautifully shot film. Henry Cavill is surprisingly good, Armie Hammer was fine, I actually wanted MORE Hugh Grant and Elizabeth Debicki was absolutely stunning in her period costumes. The worst part? Yeah, it was kind of Alicia Vikander. It’s not that she was bad, per se. She had chemistry with Armie and she looked adorable in her mod-costumes. But her appallingly bad accent work kept taking me out of the film. One second she sounds Swedish (which she is, although her character was supposed to be German), the next second she sounds American, then British, then some kind of hokey German accent. It’s weird that no one told her “just pick an accent and stick with it, honey.”
Anyway, Alicia gave an interview to Vulture several days ago – you can read the full piece here. There were some highlights I wanted to show you, especially the Harvey Weinstein question in context.
The lack of female-dominated films: “I did four films in over a year, and I was like the only woman in all of them. It was not until I did Tulip Fever, a film that’s yet to come out, that I actually had scenes that were just me and another woman, Holliday Grainger. She’s a terrific actress, and we both got a bit shocked while we were doing our scenes, like, “This is so rare!” How strange it is that it is so rare.
She grew up with a lot of now-famous Swedes: “It’s because it’s so dark and cold for so many months of the year, so people just stay in and get creative! But yeah, I grew up with five or six girlfriends in Sweden who were my best friends, and Tove Lo is one of those girls in our group. I even shared a flat a few years back with my friends from Icona Pop, and they’re coming to the premiere tonight! And the other day, I saw a friend of mine, Rebecca Ferguson — another fellow Swede — in Mission: Impossible, and she was just kicking ass. She was extraordinary in that part.”
Vulture: At Cannes this year, Harvey Weinstein said he was so enamored of you that he asked you to play a part in Bradley Cooper’s chef movie, Burnt. What is it like to get that call from Harvey?
AV: “It was a very tight schedule, because I had to go off and do The Light Between Oceans, but first of all, I’m the biggest foodie imaginable. And I think they know that! As soon as I was able to work as a teenager, I saved up money to go to Barcelona and San Sebastian to go to restaurants. So I was thrilled because of that, and when they called me and asked me to come in for a few days, I was excited. It’s a very, very tiny part, just two big scenes, but they’re really good ones.”
I like how she avoided talking about Harvey Weinstein and his attentions towards her by just talking about the B-Coop movie. Although it’s worth noting that Harvey is behind Tulip Fever as well, so she has two Harvey-backed films now. Wait, is The Danish Girl produced by The Weinstein Company as well? Crap. Please, Alicia, do not become one of Harvey’s girls. Is there a real danger there? Usually he chooses blondes, but I could see how he would decide to force Alicia down everyone’s throats for a year or two. Let’s hope these roles don’t need any kind of major accent work.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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