ALICIA VIKANDER and co-star Michael Fassbender will always look back fondly on filming The Light Between Oceans.
And not because shooting the period romantic drama meant spending a few months on location in New Zealand and Australia.
What happened was that while starring as a couple who meet and fall in love, life imitated art and the pair are now Hollywood’s most-devoted couple.
But as two talented actors playing lovers on screen who begin to have feelings off screen, are you always sure it’s not just a trick of the brain?
“It wasn’t the first time in a movie either of us had played somebody who is falling in love,” laughs Michael who, at 39, is a decade older than the Swedish actress.
“There’s an element of separation there. If I’m playing a murderer, I don’t go out and start murdering people!”
The pair have managed to keep their private lives private unlike a lot of celebrity couples who don’t.
“But that’s other people,” Michael adds.
“Each to their own. I’m not going to talk about my private life with a total stranger unless I feel like I need to. Why would I?
“I might have been curious about actors’ lives when I was growing up — that’s human nature, we’re all curious about a lot of things.
“But it’s the worst thing when you’re sitting there in the theatre going: ‘Oh, that’s the guy who dates this person and likes to do this in the morning and that in the afternoon.’
“Then you’re watching a brand as opposed to an actor.”
“And I think we’ve made a clear statement that we keep certain things just between us,” says Alicia.
“It was very easy to unite, but that’s quite personal.”
Hopefully, however, they’ll have a less-rocky time of it than their characters, lighthouse keepers who, after several miscarriages find a rowing boat washed ashore carrying a corpse and a baby girl.
They raise her as their own only to encounter a bereaved woman a few years later, when the husband reveals their deception which sees him arrested and their daughter taken from them.
The picture was filmed in a remote part of New Zealand and Alicia admits: “On the first day of filming, I got breathless.
“I was on the top of the lighthouse by myself and I could look out 360 degrees and not see another human being.
“I felt so much a part of the elements out there, I kind of wanted Mother Nature to calm down!
“One of the nights a storm hit, I thought my trailer might just pitch over any second. It did jump a bit, I got quite scared.”
“When the wind picked up, it was pretty exhilarating — and maddening,” adds Michael.
“In the story, the previous lighthouse keeper ends up killing himself — that struck home to me!
“On the first few nights, we were in these caravans and they were rocking back and forth because of the relentless howling of the wind.”
The Light Between Oceans is in cinemas from Tuesday, November 1
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