Alicia is featured on the cover of the January issue of Vogue US, photographed by David Sims. I’ve just added high-quality pictures of the photoshoot to our gallery, as well as the digital scan of her cover. Keep reading for her interview, and don’t forget to check out the full article at Vogue.com. The issue officially hits newsstands on December 22.

About her life as a ballerina: “I push myself hard,” she concedes. “I don’t like pain, exactly, but as a ballerina I lived in constant pain. At ballet school in Stockholm, I remember we had a locker where if someone had been to the doctor and gotten painkillers, we divided them among us. In a sense we were all addicted. After I quit dancing, for a while it felt strange not to be in pain. It was as if an old friend, not a good friend but a presence, always tagging along, had left me.”

About all her films happening at once: “To be quite honest, it’s nerve-racking, the way these films sort of piled up,” she says. “It’s a mixed feeling when everything you’ve ever wanted in making films is coming true, and yet you feel scared because it’s happening all at once. Suddenly you’re in rooms with people you’ve looked up to for years, the Judi Denches. You wonder if you’re good, if you have what it takes. You carry an anxiety around with you—I’ve met many actors now who will say this—and the lonely feeling that this could be your one chance.”

About The Danish Girl: “This was not a film of the ‘now’ when we started making it,” Alicia explains, “and it’s frankly amazing to think of the cultural change that has taken place since we started. But I think it’s important to remember that the issues Lili encountered 100 years ago are still issues. You read the statistics about how trans people are physically and psychologically abused, how they are discriminated against at work. This is a civil rights movement.”

About not looking like a typical Swede: “Two years of films where I had to be white as a ghost,” she says now, laughing. “But I’m a real Swede! In fact, I’m a quarter Finnish. Here I go, exploding stereotypes.”

“I figured I’d be a local actress, like my mum was”

About acting in English, her non-native language: “I think I’ve been very self-conscious trying to express myself in a new language, and sometimes I don’t recognize the person that comes out,” she says. “In Swedish the filter between my thoughts and my language is much thinner, so things just flow.”

About her mom being a stage-actress: “The theater is a great place for a kid to grow up,” she says, “because the grown-ups actually play for a living. And because of that I think they were open to us in a way most adults aren’t.”

“In ballet school we all had very good grades,” she recalls, “but not because you needed to be smart to dance. It was because ballet is about perfection, and if you weren’t perfect, it was like the world was falling apart. I experienced a lot of stress around that. I went to therapy without telling my parents.”

About Gerda, her character in The Danish Girl: “Your job as an actor is to try to understand your character’s humanity,” she says. “When she does things that people might judge harshly, you have to summon a real sympathy for her. When she is purely good and you fear that you’ll become disconnected from her, you search for doubts, flaws. In the end, you succeed when you show both sides.”