Does Alicia Vikander speak Japanese?

Swedish actress Alicia Vikander does not speak Japanese. Questions about whether or not she speaks Japanese surfaced when she starred in the movie “Earthquake Bird.”

Based on the novel by Susanna Jones, the film follows Vikander’s character, translator Lucy Fly, an ex-pat living in Japan who begins a romantic relationship with photographer Teiji, played by Naoki Kobayashi.

The film, which premiered at the BFI London Film Festival in 2019, required Alicia Vikander to speak in Japanese in numerous scenes.

During the premiere, she told Reuters that she had to learn Japanese for three months. She said, “I wish I could tell you that I knew Japanese and I learned it in three months.”

“I mean I did an immense amount of work to be able to do the Japanese and being bilingual I know you can’t just mimic words and sounds, you need to know what you’re saying.”

“So I did everything from reading my scenes out loud in English and then we kind of reworked on translating them to get the kind of sensitivity and the emotion and the subtext that I had in my acting, hopefully. It was a lot of work.”