Alicia Vikander has revealed she deliberately hasn't watched the finished cut of her new film The Echo Chamber, preferring to experience it for the first time with an audience at the Venice Film Festival. The Oscar-winning actress, known for The Danish Girl and Ex Machina, plays Anne opposite Italian actor Luca Marinelli's Leo in the drama, which is based on a screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci, completed before his death in 2018. Vikander spoke to The Hollywood Reporter from Spain, where she is on a family sailing holiday, ahead of the film's premiere.

Directed by Andrea Pallaoro, whom Vikander first met at the Marrakech Film Festival, The Echo Chamber is set in London but was filmed in Rome and traces the cyclical, non-chronological relationship between Anne and Leo, with Susan Sarandon co-starring as Ava. Vikander said she mapped the script into chronological order herself to better understand her character, despite the finished film's shuffled timeline, and praised Pallaoro's attentive, actor-focused directing style, which let her and Marinelli build an authentic rapport by shooting scenes largely in sequence.