Alicia Vikander recalls Julianne Moore defending her from crude joke on set

Actress Alicia Vikander has recalled the moment Julianne Moore leapt to her defence after a man made a crude joke about her on set.

They starred together in 2014 fantasy film Seventh Son, about two years before Vikander won an Oscar for The Danish Girl.

She claimed a man made a distasteful comment about her on the set of the film, leading Hollywood veteran Moore to step in.

The women are reuniting for biopic The Glorias, both playing feminist Gloria Steinem, at different points in her life.

Vikander appears on the front of Elle UK’s October issue, and said Moore’s intervention “meant the world to me”.

She told the magazine: “I was just thankful to be there, I was afraid of speaking up or losing respect or that people would find me difficult.

“I think she was like, ‘If you ever say anything like that again, I’m leaving and we’re done’. That changed my situation on set going forward and it meant the world to me.”

Swedish actress Vikander, 31, is married to Irish-German star Michael Fassbender, 43.

In The Glorias she plays Steinem from the age of 20-40, while Moore takes over for the US activist’s later years.

Vikander said events of recent years have shown the importance of Steinem’s work.

“I’ve grown up in a house with a mother who taught me about the word feminism from the age of five,” she said. “And I respect that, but then we’re all part of the general unconscious bias of the world we’ve been brought up in.

“I feel over the past few years, and then seeing Gloria’s work and her history, we’re being confronted again, knowing that it’s been a very hard journey and that there is so much work and thought that has been put into it and that sadly doesn’t often happen by itself.

“Time helps, but it’s also due to some incredible people along the way who have been daring enough, when everyone else is trying to shut them down.”

The October issue of Elle UK is on sale from September 3.