Even at a young age, Alicia Vikander had a preternatural ability to emote on camera.
Long before she was rebooting the Tomb Raider franchise, Vikander appeared on a televised "talent show" in Sweden. At some point during award season in 2015, "people were trying to find clips online" from one her TV debut, she recalled on NBC's The Tonight Show Wednesday. The show, Småstjärnorna, ran from 1995 to 2003. As Vikander explained, "It's a lip sync battle."
Since Jimmy Fallon is an executive producer on Paramount Network's Lip Sync Battle, the 29-year-old actress joked with him, "You should have competed with 8-year-old Alicia lip syncing!"
Although she actually won the competition, Vikander was slightly embarrassed by her own performance. "All the other kids had Tina Turner, cool rock stars and Michael Jackson...and I had this Swedish ballad," the Academy Award winner remembered. "But it was very dramatic."
As luck would have it, Fallon had a clip from her 1997 appearance, in which a young Vikander said, "I'm going to be an actress." When the host mentioned that she had previously expressed interest in singing, the confident child said, "It's hard to choose. It's gonna be one or the other." Looking back on her interview and performance, Vikander said, "It's so funny, because I say there with such certainty I want to be an actress. I didn't even know I was gonna be an actress!"
(E! and NBC are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)