Alicia Vikander revealed she had an “extreme, painful” miscarriage before becoming pregnant with her and Michael Fassbender’s first baby.
“We have a child now, but it took us time,” the 33-year-old actress told The Times in an interview published Sunday.
“I’ve been trying to get pregnant for a while,” she continued. “So I had hard times during the lockdown [amid the coronavirus pandemic]. I struggled for a while. … For a while I didn’t think I could get pregnant.”
Although Vikander was initially dubious about sharing her pregnancy loss, she decided the “tough” experience was too “universal” to keep to herself.
“I stopped for a bit and thought, ‘Am I going to talk about this?'” she explained. “But so many women go through similar things.”
The Oscar winner went on to say that her miscarriage experience gave “another meaning” to her role in 2016’s “The Light Between Oceans” in which her character, Isabel Graysmark, lost two pregnancies.
Additionally, in her recent HBO miniseries ‘Irma Vep’, Vikander plays a pop star who occurs immediately after a miscarriage.
Vikander compared the fictional celebrity to her colleagues, saying, “Sometimes you go through difficult things in life, and if you have an office job, you can take a break.
“But there are times [they] went through something and, well, I can’t understand how they went on the red carpet after that,” she continued. “To be met by people who ask, ‘How are you?’ Considering what they had just been through? Most people wouldn’t be able to leave their homes.”
When Vikander conceived her rainbow baby, she kept her pregnancy private.
News broke in August 2021 that she and Fassbender, 45, had become parents when they were spotted carrying a pram.
The “Blue Bayou” star confirmed the news to People the following month, but chose not to share the baby’s name or gender.
She and Fassbender, who married in Spain in October 2017, have been notoriously private since their romance began in 2014.