Colleagues tend to point out Alicia’s self-discipline, her drive, her seriousness of purpose. In an email, Fassbender praised her intense physicality, “the way she embodies her characters from head to toe.” They assume these qualities came from a decade of ballet, and while they may be right, these could have been the traits that pushed Vikander toward ballet in the first place. “In dance, if you don’t get it right, you do it again and again and again,” Redmayne observes. “There are no kid gloves the way there are sometimes on a movie set, where you’re allowed to save the best performance for the close-up. Alicia grew up with that work ethic. When she came to audition for The Danish Girl, she had just come from The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and she needed to leave in the middle to shoot The Light Between Oceans. I said, ‘You’ve got to take a holiday.’ But no, her appetite was too rapacious for that.”