'Light' shines on Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander romance
NEW YORK — In The Light Between Oceans, Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander are doomed newlyweds whose makeshift family collapses under the weight of moral dilemmas.
But off-camera, the real-life couple's love story is much rosier. It began in 2013 with a classic meet-cute: on the dance floor during the Toronto International Film Festival, where the two were promoting their respective 12 Years A Slave and The Fifth Estate.
"We had a boogie," Vikander remembers. "He's a very good dancer."
"I felt like I couldn't dance," Fassbender demurs. "I thought I was pretty good, but she was there with a friend of hers, just jiving all over the place. I was like, 'God, I feel like I've got two left feet.' Then I left, defeated."
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The actors reunited a year later to shoot Oceans (in theaters nationwide Friday), where their relationship blossomed on the period drama's set in Australia and New Zealand. But sitting on near-opposite ends of a Ritz-Carlton hotel room in Battery Park, the elusive pair is strictly professional. They praise each other as "fierce," "brave" and "committed" co-stars, yet they skirt around the topic of their public smooch at the Academy Awards in February, when Vikander won best supporting actress for The Danish Girl. ("I was very pleased for Alicia," Fassbender offers simply.)
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Some pundits on GoldDerby.com predict that the Swedish breakout will be back in awards contention for her turn as Oceans' Isabel, whose whirlwind romance and marriage to lighthouse keeper Tom (Fassbender) results in heartache when she suffers two miscarriages. Their grief dissipates when a dinghy washes ashore carrying a dead man and a baby girl, whom they opt not to report to authorities and instead raise as their own daughter (Florence Clery). For years, they live in familial bliss, until a chance encounter with Lucy's birth mother (Rachel Weisz) sends the couple into a moral tailspin.
That ethical gray area was what attracted Fassbender to Oceans, which Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance adapted from M.L. Stedman's best-selling 2012 novel.
"When I read the script, it just really hit an emotional chord," says Fassbender, 39. "It seemed like a really important story that a lot of people could relate to." Plus, "it didn't have a villain and a good guy. It was just about regular, decent people who make a bad choice and have to deal with the consequences."
Rather than stay in hotels, Fassbender and Vikander, 27, lived in trailers on the set, creating an atmosphere that "was super-intimate, almost like going to camp," Cianfrance says. "You have these bonds that are unbreakable, and that's what we had when we shot this movie. Their relationship that happened wasn't anything anyone was thinking of when we were making it."
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Cianfrance fully immersed his stars in Oceans' picturesque world, asking Fassbender to live in a lighthouse alone for three days so he could better understand Tom's isolation. To capture Isabel's awestruck arrival on the island, he brought Vikander to the set in a blindfold on her first day and had her wait indoors until sunrise.
After hopping in a car around 2 a.m., "they took me down this road and we got to this space, where they told me to open my eyes," says Vikander, who was expecting to be wowed by the scenery. "I was in a woodshed."
Fassbender deadpans: "And that's when things got really freaky."
