13 Things You Need to Know About Hollywood's New It Girl, Alicia Vikander

Alicia was born on Oct. 3, 1988, in Gothenburg, Sweden, which is a major city on the country's west coast.

Alicia was drawn to the stage early on, choosing to study ballet at the Royal Swedish Ballet School in Stockholm, Sweden, for nine years. She didn't decide to become an actress until multiple dance injuries (and surgeries on her feet and back) made her look for a different creative outlet. "When I did [television], I realized that I had a strong passion that was beyond what I felt for dancing," she explained in an interview with The Telegraph.

As a young teenager, Alicia made the decision to move to Stockholm on her own in the hopes of advancing her dancing career — talk about fearless.

Her father is a psychiatrist and her mother is stage actress Maria Fahl Vikander, and both of them deeply support her career in Hollywood. Her father happened to be one of the biggest reasons Alicia accepted her now Oscar-nominated role in The Danish Girl. "My dad read The Danish Girl and fell in love with it," she revealed. "He told me: 'You need to do this film.'" Thanks, Mr. Vikander!

One of Alicia's earliest roles in 2007 was playing Jossan Tegebrandt Bjorn on Andra Avenyn, a Swedish TV series chronicling the lives of people living on the outskirts of Gothenburg. Check out her early acting skills above!

Alicia has held her own on screen with Hollywood heavyweights like Eddie Redmayne, Oscar Isaac, and Keira Knightley in The Danish Girl, Ex Machina, and Anna Karenina, respectively, and many critics found that Alicia's performance outshined those of her costars.

The notoriously private couple finally made their PDA-heavy award show debut at this year's Golden Globes, where they held hands and cuddled up against each other in the audience. Although Alicia was originally supposed to star with Michael in the movie version of Assassin's Creed, she had to drop it so she could accept a role in the untitled Bourne 5 movie. Thankfully, you'll still be able to see the pair on screen together in The Light Between Oceans, which is slated to come out this year.

The Guldbagge Awards are the Swedish equivalent to the Oscars, and Alicia took home the best actress trophy for her gritty performance in the psychodrama Pure in 2010.

Alicia bested the likes of Rooney Mara and Rachel McAdams in the best supporting actress category at the Oscars in late February, where she delivered an emotional acceptance speech that had everyone in near tears.

For her role as Caroline in A Royal Affair with Mads Mikkelsen, the actress only had two months to learn how to speak Dutch. She ended up having her mom's friend, who natively spoke the language, record all of the lines she knew she'd have to speak for the movie so that she could listen to them on her iPhone and practice.

Thanks to her extremely stylish tendencies, it came as no surprise when Louis Vuitton named her as ambassador of the brand for its Series 3 campaign, which was shot by Juergen Teller in May 2015.

After Alicia spent months and months trying to get her big break in the film industry, she got a call from Universal asking her to fly to Los Angeles to read for the part of Snow White in an upcoming adaptation of the film. "I was on the phone crying at a Starbucks," she told W magazine. "People thought I was having a breakup with my boyfriend! I said, 'No — it's good news! I'm going to have a career!'" As everyone knows, Kristen Stewart ended up nabbing the role, but thankfully Alicia seems to be doing quite well without it on her résumé.

Most plot details for the new addition to the action franchise have been kept secret, but Alicia let a few things about her character slip through. "I'm not doing the conventional action, but I'm very action-driven in this film," Vikander said in an interview with The Wrap. "But it's not in the way most people would think."