“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

- George Orwell

The most interesting thing about history is that it doesn’t objectively exist.What we tend to blithely refer to as historical fact is largely a construct of the present, and the vantage point from which it has been written is always culturally specific. Taking this as an absolute, one must ask the question: to what degree do the various narratives of past eras hold any credence at all, beyond mere advantageous political and religious symbolism? There is only one thing we can say about history for sure, and that is that it has largely been written by men—women more often than not being consigned to the vast obscurities of its long shadows.

It is precisely these dark corners that the feminist actor Alicia Vikander is keen to discuss when we meet on a sunny morning in a café on England’s Lane, just a stone’s throw from her home in leafy North London. Her latest film plays precisely with the malleable nature of historical narrative in order to shine a light on issues that are still prevalent today. Firebrand by Brazilian auteur Karim Aïnouz is an adaptation of Queen’s Gambit by Elizabeth Fremantle, and is duly set in the final days of English Tudor monarch Henry VIII. Its focus, however, is not on the tyrannical king, but rather the last of his wives, Catherine Parr—who somehow not only managed to survive her husband’s penchant for dispatching female heads from their shoulders, but also become the first woman to publish under her own name in Britain.

Vikander is the perfect choice to mold a vision of such a complex and enigmatic force of nature. After all, there is already a panoply of strong and conflicted female characters in the actor’s award-winning armory—from the artificially created protagonist of Ex Machina, to the spouse of an early transitional therapy adoptee in The Danish Girl and, of course, successor to Jolie in the Tomb Raider franchise. Admiration for the actor extends past her on-screen characters and into her actual likeness, having been an ambassador of Louis Vuitton for nearly a decade. In Firebrand, her character is under life-threatening pressure of a far more domestic and all-too-common nature than the problems germane to gun-slinging Lara Croft. Firebrand’s Catherine Parr risks her own existence every day as the dutiful wife to a bitter, sickly, and sometimes malevolent Henry VIII (played with unsettling verve by Jude Law), while simultaneously risking treason and the wrath of the Catholic Church to financially support the cause of early religious reformists.

As such, this darkly lit view of the blood-soaked early days of Protestantism circumnavigates historical accuracy to train the viewer’s attention toward a timeless struggle for female empowerment in the paradigm of brutal patriarchy. The mood is suitably menacing, with Vikander’s Parr displaying social gymnastics par excellence to secure relative safety for her and her children inside a gilded cage of a marriage—including, of course, her stepdaughter Elizabeth, who would one day become England’s legendary warrior Queen. The film is then less of a historical artifact than it is a weapon intended to enact cinematic vengeance on the spectre of male-supremacism with—cue spoiler alert—Catherine aiding Henry VIII’s violent departure from this mortal coil in an uncomfortably long choking scene.

Vikander saw new Guy Maddin-directed film Rumours premiere at Cannes this May—wherein she plays alongside Cate Blanchett in the wayward G7 conference attendees satire— and it’s out this fall. She will also appear in The Assessment, a psychological drama about near future birth rate control and a couple’s efforts to win the right to procreate. Despite the chilling scene of her atop Henry VIII still churning through my psyche, today she is much more chilled out than the fierce avenging angel that I had watched commit savage regicide the night before our meeting, and proves to be very easy and down-to-earth company. As we order coffee, I can’t help but mention that I used to work in a bar just around the corner from where we are seated with her husband Michael Fassbender in the nascent days of his acting career. Soon enough, we are ensconced in a friendly freewheeling philosophical conversation that begins in the shadows of the past but winds up in the outer reaches of the future.

I think the most interesting thing about history is to what degree it actually exists—it’s always written from the narrow perspective of the present...
And it’s maybe an even narrower perspective than we think. When we actually started to do prep for the film, Jude, Karim and I started to ask each other, ‘What do you have? What books are you reading?’ And, as we started to share things, we came to realize that all these historians have just these very few pillars to work from, and that history books all turn out very different, because the authors read their own things into the narrative to fit in-between these pillars. I guess part of the beauty of history is that puzzle of trying to figure out what actually did happen in-between—especially if you go 500 years back in time.

It’s also fascinating what changes and what remains the same when we look to the past…

Yeah. We were actually shooting the film around the same time as The Coronation took place. We watched all of that pageantry, and were, like, ‘Look, there’s no difference!’ It was interesting to discover that it is still kind of there in our reality. And this story, which happened a long time ago, still rings so true today. It’s about power and abuse within a marriage. The kind of abuse we see in the relationship is something that you still see now in very closed and domestic settings. Our focus was very much about that reality—what it was like to have been in the bedroom of Henry VIII? What did they talk about? What did they hang out doing?

It also presents an idea of how she may have navigated the abuse...
In this extremely abusive relationship, where the power structure is the way it is, it was incredible that Catherine was the first woman to ever publish under her own name, and that is obviously a huge thing. She was able to publish as a woman in her own name for the first time in history whilst being married to him. Female voices from even a hundred years ago are still sparse, so it felt pretty magical reading her texts. Here is a brilliant mother and devoted Christian woman who’s afraid of her life every single day—a woman who knows the amount of wives before her who had already been killed—and her own friends are being killed off. How do you even function in that environment? How do you even go about your day?

I thought it was also interesting how the film shows women being very much in the minority at court...
Right? At court, there would be 350 men, and about 10 women who always lived in just two rooms. Take away the time reference and you’re, like, ‘Okay, so she is in a big, big place where people are being killed every day.’ She can’t get out. She can’t leave. She also did not choose to get married. She was picked. And, as we still know, for anyone in an abusive relationship, it can be very hard to leave. On top of that, it’s also clear from reading her texts that she believes she has very much been chosen, and that God has put her on this path. She is now a queen, and she sees it as her mission to speak his words. But just to survive, she needs to maneuver her husband, or fit into his fantasy of what she’s supposed to be like. We had to also find moments of real emotional intimacy in that, because I do believe that that must have been there for her to stay alive.

Do you think women still have to navigate certain kinds of men in much the same way?
Well, I thought about this a lot post #MeToo. I look younger than I am, so when I was about 22 years old, I looked about 16, and I remember up to the age of about 23, I actually did have a  lot of men who approached me; men in their mid-40s who would come up and be like, ‘Hi...’ And I always knew how to be very nice about it—I would laugh, smile, wave my hand, and just kind of swerve it with the least amount of fuss. But I’ve been speaking to my younger brother lately, who’s 22, and his girlfriend, and they’re like, ‘No, that’s not okay.’ And I know it’s not. I’m a feminist, but I did grow up in a time where it still felt as though it was very much needed. Obviously, Catherine has to do it with her life at stake, but you know, it definitely comes from the same place.

Catherine dispatches of Henry pretty brutally in the end. It could be argued that the film takes some license with history…

When we did research about what was known about his death, it turned out we didn’t know much about it at all. What you do know is that he was alone with her in this room for several days. That was interesting. I’ve never talked about the ending, but I think it was very important to us all that it was not a gimmick. Karim said very early on that for him the film could not have ended in any other way. It’s a film about a woman that has had her history—even though it’s so remarkable—erased, and it’s about celebrating her and the fact that she did survive. To me, that’s what this scene symbolized in the end.

It’s quite shocking as it is so unexpected.

It plays with unconscious bias and that idea of women as vulnerable. Throughout history, people assume that women cannot in any way be a threat, and that’s an advantage. Most people, when they see her being pushed in that room with him, are still, like, ‘Oh, my God!’ Even as a woman, you just read straight into the vulnerability of women. That was something that I realized when I was playing it too. There is this sense of, ‘Oh, they’re locking the doors!’ Then the realization comes that this is not some poor little woman. He’s locked in with her, as much as she is locked in with him. He’s very physically weak, which is also a reason why she probably could have done that to him. 

The whole film sort of deals with mortality and good and evil, doesn’t it? There is a great line where she asks Henry VIII if he believes in Hell? On a personal level, do you believe in Hell?

I guess I don’t believe in Hell in the way that most Christians do. What is right or wrong, or good or evil? It seems like one can’t exist without the other. I create art, and I think it can touch on something bigger about human nature. The beauty of making scenes for me is about getting to use my own life experience of creating these fantasy characters in
my own head, and then trying to embody them, and there’s a moment sometimes when you lose yourself and get to inhabit emotions—actions and feelings that can either be admirable— or totally disgusting. I’m actually reading quite a lot at the moment about coexisting in a different place at the same time—about multi-universes. I’ve always had an interest in science fiction, which comes from my dad. Half of his library is science fiction.

It often feels as if we are currently living in a science fiction novel that isn’t a million miles from Ex Machina…

Yeah, I find the whole artificial general intelligence idea, well...I shouldn’t say terrifying, but I can’t get my head around it because it’s expanding so fast. I remember seeing AlphaGo, the documentary that came out in 2017. Go is high art, and one of the most difficult human games. It is not endless, but it has so many possibilities. In Asia, there are four areas where you can have virtuosos. We have them in art, literature, and music, but they have it in Go too, going back thousands of years. It’s an art, because it’s about the beauty of seeing patterns. Anyway, in 2015 Google DeepMind produced AlphaGo, and the computer put down a move that had everyone in the world baffled. They initially thought the computer had made a mistake and had made a move that a six-year-old who had never played Go would make. But that move turned out to be so artistic that it completely changed the history of the game.

That is intense. Do you subscribe to the idea of AI as guided evolution?
Well, I remember 10 years ago, we were talking about putting chips in ourselves and death becoming a medical issue—and now that is what medical companies are starting to call it, because you can start to single down all the cognitive diseases. We live in an age where we might soon live 30, 40, 50 years more. In terms of guided evolution, one view I found interesting was that we are already becoming a kind of supercomputer, because we can access everything on our phone. What if we all had the internet in our brains, together simultaneously? It’s a bit like asking the mouse if they want to be smart as a human—obviously the mouse doesn’t know what that is, but it’s probably going to say, ‘Yeah.’ I mean, what is it: to be more smart or clever? What does that involve? Potentially, you can have this whole collection of information, but consciousness is another discussion—the only component we still don’t have is a sense of what consciousness is.

How do ideas of faith play out in that paradigm?

Well, for me, whenever we talk about faith, then we talk about science. One time, I made a film with Wim Wenders where I had to play a scientist in a submarine that goes to the bottom of the ocean. I got to meet some of the world’s best scientists and hang out with them, and what amazed me was that the whole group were religious. I said, ‘Okay, why is that?’They were, like, because with science and religion, one can’t exist without one another. To one woman, I was like, ‘Why do you go into the office every day? Do you have a life mission?’ And she said, ‘Yeah, I want to find life on Mars. I’m trying to prove that the same living organisms 10,000 meters down underwater, can be found on another planet.’ Her point was that that’s what we all do.We come with these ideas that are all faith-related and religious, and then, the moment we find the proof for them, the same thing that was religious a second ago is now science—we are all engaged in this mystery.