The Queen’s Wood Cafe in Highgate, London, is one of those formerly secret places in London that used to be known only by locals and is now a star on Instagram. Built for a wood-keeper in 1898, it is like a fairy-tale cottage, emerging unexpectedly from the trees around it, covered in fading bunting and twinkling lights. I’ve suggested it as a quiet place to meet, but Alicia Vikander already knows it. “I used to come here with the kids,” she says with a smile, as she goes to the counter to buy us both a coffee. She may have been born in Sweden and since settled in Portugal, but a big part of her heart belongs to north London, where she lived for many years.

She’s here at the moment because she is about to make her first appearance onstage since she was a teenager, opposite Andrew Lincoln at the Bridge Theatre, in director Simon Stone’s radical reimagining of The Lady From the Sea by Henrik Ibsen. For nearly 15 years Vikander, 36, has been a fixture on screens, bringing her delicate yet exacting talent and endless versatility to bear on films that range from historical biopic (Testament of Youth) to sci-fi (Ex Machina) to blockbuster action (Tomb Raider and Jason Bourne). She was 27 when she won an Oscar for The Danish Girl, and with it global renown. “Alicia is the most formidable actor,” says Eddie Redmayne, her costar in that film. “She has this dumbfounding and unique mix of physical, tangible technique. I don’t know if that stems from her rigorous ballet and dance background mixed with complete abandon and freedom in the moment.”

Wearing a black Toteme coat—“very Swedish”—against an early summer breeze, with her Louis Vuitton (she’s a brand ambassador) handbag on the table between us, she flings herself into our conversation with enthusiasm and intelligence. She is excited and a little terrified about her latest role. The Lady From the Sea, one of Ibsen’s most mysterious and allusive plays, centers on the figure of Ellida, a lighthouse keeper’s daughter with a maritime obsession. In the original, she is married to a doctor and haunted by the death of her infant son, when a sailor from her past, a man who had asked her to wait for him, returns to claim her. (A caveat: since Stone has a reputation for completely rethinking classic plays, any resemblance to the original is likely to be tangential.)