Alicia Vikander opens about her miscarriage and how it gave her past work a ‘new meaning’

Alicia Vikander has reflected on having a miscarriage after previously portraying a character that suffers two pregnancy losses in The Light Between Oceans.

Earlier this year, Vikander – who stars as budding actor Mira Harberg in the HBO miniseries Irma Vep – revealed that she and her husband, fellow actor Michael Fassbender, had suffered a pregnancy loss during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The famously private couple met on the set of 2016’s The Light Between Oceans, a romance drama about a couple who find a baby lost at sea.

Vikander and Fassbender married in 2017 and have since welcomed a baby son.

In a new interview, Vikander said that her own pregnancy loss was a reminder of the 2016 film, in which her character suffers two miscarriages.

“Talk about meta,” she told The Sunday Times. “[The miscarriage] was so extreme, painful to go through and, of course, it made me recall making that film. That film has another meaning now.”

The forthcoming series Irma Vep – a take on the Maggie Cheung 1996 film of the same name – also portrays pregnancy loss and tells the story of a pop star who suffers a miscarriage but is told to perform that same night.

Vikander said this “double life” is a reality for many people in the public eye.

“Sometimes you go through things that are tough in life and if you have an office job you can step away for a bit,” she explained.

“But there are times that myself or colleagues have been through something and, well, I can’t understand how they went on to the red carpet afterwards.

“To be met by people asking, ‘How are you doing?’ Given what they had just been through? Most people would not be able to step out of their house.”

Vikander first opened up about her miscarriage in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar earlier this year.

She said that the pregnancy loss had brought home how much she wanted to be a mother, and that having her baby her has changed her life “in every way”.

“I tried to get pregnant for a while. So I had tough times during lockdown. I struggled for a while. But I think it’s universal and so many women go through similar things. And it’s tough.”

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