Alicia is featured in Flaunt Magazine’s September 2024 issue! Yesterday they shared a beautiful behind the scenes clip from her her photoshoot, which you can watch at the end of this post. Outtakes from the shoot can be found in our gallery here, and you can read her full feature on their website – I have included the introduction and a link to the full feature below! She discuss her new film Firebrand, as well as #MeToo, AI and more.

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. | Read the full interview