At Le Pain Quotidien in Brooklyn Heights, where many thirty- and fortysomethings come to sweat it out on their television pilot/novel/screenplay/tech start-up or other get-rich-quick scheme, 24-year-old Noam Ash and 25-year-old Austin Bening are giddily basking in their recent Hollywood glory, having just learned that they’re this close to selling their YouTube Web series, My Gay Roommate, to one of the premium online networks. Like most things YouTube, the series, about a gay college student and his straight roommate, is about themselves. The show’s star, Ash, an Israeli-American, is the gay one. The director, Bening, grew up in Ohio, having never known a gay person until 2009, when he met Ash, his freshman roommate, at Tufts. They have lived with each other ever since.

“Six years, domestic partnership in the making, shared bank account. It was a beautiful thing,” says Ash, who speaks with rapid-fire excitement. He notices that Bening is looking at him funny. “Do I have something?”

“Yes, bubeleh,” says Bening as he reaches across their quinoa salads to wipe Ash’s face. “You got this little schmutz right here.”

Much to their amusement, people were puzzled by this rapport. (“People were like, ‘But you’ve made out.’ I was like, ‘No, never!’ ” says Ash.) And thus the germ for their YouTube series was born. With zero dollars and free college equipment they started the series—each episode is actually just a five-minute installment—during their last year of college. They continued it after graduating, when they moved into Ash’s aunt and uncle’s attic. Zero views turned into a thousand, turned into half a million, snowballed into 4.6 million. Fall 2015 had them making the rounds in Hollywood, pitching a fully fleshed-out take. From the buyers’ perspective, their built-in fan base was the key. Without it, says Ash, places like Netflix “would be like, ‘Thank you so much. You’re really, really cute. Like, go get a P.A. job, like, work in the industry for 10 years, and then maybe we’ll let you write half a script.’” But with fans apparently in the millions, says Ash, “they [are] like, ‘Come into our office.’ … I keep thinking how fucking lucky we’ve been. As an actor, no one would have known who I was.”

Apparently, it wasn’t enough that the YouTubers stole our children. Surely you’ve noticed, they enjoy nothing more than sitting with their eyes glued to their gadget, watching YouTubers see if they can deep-fry a pair of glasses, earnestly muse on empowerment, “vlog” about their activities that week, or give spirited running commentary while they play Minecraft. Now they’re conquering Hollywood, selling television series, making feature-length movies, and talking about “narrative.” More than 200 of them are worth several million dollars. They have agents and publicists, in addition to multi-channel networks (MCNs), which aggregate creators’ channels and manage their careers. Disney, DreamWorks Animation, and Warner Bros. have spent nearly $1 billion getting into the game. Production companies making digital series and movies have popped up, backed by the biggest names in the Hollywood establishment, such as Peter Chernin and Brian Grazer. And they’ve created a generation of expert salesmen who insist this is the future. Consider the words of Brent Weinstein, 40, who heads the digital-talent division of the Hollywood talent agency UTA. “The evolution of these types of content creators has dramatically and forever changed the landscape of entertainment,” he says.

Note to readers over the age of 25: this is Phase Two of the YouTube revolution, which likely requires an understanding of Phase One. Eleven years ago, when YouTube launched, no one imagined a career could be built out of it, much less an industry. “It was a playground for trying new things. It was purely a creative exercise,” says Rhett McLaughlin, 38, of Rhett & Link, a juvenile yet sharp comedy duo worth a reported $7 million, who started in the first wave. “There was no money in it. No brand integration.” There was something for everyone—pranks, satirical songs, makeup tips, goofy cooking, teenage activism, and lifelines for young gay people. It was a beautiful thing: a democratic platform, with a positive ethos; a grassroots Disney, created entirely by regular kids.

Then something crazy happened. Videos started going viral, getting thousands, even millions of views. Viewers wanted more, and the creators happily obliged, often doing “collabs” with each other to double or triple their fan base. Suddenly, the kids were sitting on a gold mine, and everyone wanted a piece: advertisers; Google (which in October 2006 bought YouTube); the MCNs; the studios, which gobbled up the MCNs. Meanwhile, at UTA, William Morris, and CAA, entire floors of interns and assistants were made into agents for digital talents, with the hope of turning their new clients into the next generation of movie stars. Now, they insist, those stars have arrived.

EVERYTHING’S VINE!

One such hope is 27-year-old Andrew Bachelor, the most popular “viner” on the planet—with 14.8 million followers—whom his agents at UTA are calling the next Will Smith. “King Bach,” as he’s known, makes vines—six-second video loops—of physical, goofy scenarios that often play off black stereotypes. For example: Bach, offended by a white guy who has offered him a plate of fried chicken, then gobbles it up on the sly. Or Bach wants to “make it rain cash,” like all his homeys are doing, but then reaches into his pocket and realizes he has no money, etc. Think a single-image cartoon, starring a young Eddie Murphy, coming to life for a brief moment. Traveling today by Glideboard, and wearing low-slung jeans that expose a lot of underwear, Bachelor has joined me in the lobby of his building: the W Hollywood condos, on the corner of Vine and Hollywood (an apt address for Bachelor, given the current crossroads of his life) to tell his story.

Having taken acting classes in college in Florida, Bachelor came to Los Angeles in 2010 to attend the New York Film Academy and then to make it as an actor. But he hit the same brick wall that most do. “They were giving all the roles to people who already had the names,” says Bachelor, who’s equal parts affable and laserlike ambitious. “You can’t make a name if no one gives you a chance.” So he started making YouTube videos, hoping to build a fan base and showcase his talents. Utilizing the high production skills he learned at film school, he was spending between $5,000 and $35,000 a video. For a short while, he could afford it. (Already tech-savvy as a kid, he’d invested in Apple when he was a teenager.) He soon turned to vines, videos he could make on his phone, for a fraction of the cost. A video of him doing a Denzel Washington impersonation as an irascible bus driver went viral. Three thousand viewers turned into a million. When he reached three million, the big agencies that before wouldn’t answer his phone calls started phoning him. He bought himself a suit and sat down with Josh Katz and Emerson Davis, two agents at UTA. “They looked me in my eyes. I could tell they were genuine,” recalls Bachelor. “They realized it’s a new wave that’s coming, and I’m the leader of it, and they wanted to be on board with me.”

Soon, Bachelor was landing real roles on House of Lies, The Mindy Project, and Black Jesus. Now even the cool black guys think he’s the cool black guy. He stars with Marlon Wayans in the movie Fifty Shades of Black, and with Mike Epps in Meet the Blacks. “When they post the links online to the Fifty Shades trailer, one of the top comments is ‘King Bach!’” Bach reports. “Marlon gets tweets, ‘Definitely going to go now that King Bach is in it.’ ”

He may soon be seen in his own series on network TV, based on one of his vine characters—an undercover cop. Produced by the comedy team Key and Peele, it launched a bidding war before landing at Fox, where it is in development for next season. His ultimate goal? “To be the biggest movie star ever”—said with the kind of confidence that only a 14-million-strong fan base can bring.

Not every talent-on-the-verge is as intensely focused on world domination. You’ll find a shaggier type in 30-year-old filmmaker Freddie Wong. A friendly, high-octane teddy bear with a cerebral streak, Wong runs RocketJump, a quasi-studio that has the freewheeling vibe of a Silicon Valley start-up. Inside its Burbank warehouse, there’s a library of strategy games, big Lego creations, a 15-foot-tall, blobby Japanese mascot doll they call ChickyBoo, and a lot of young people moving around gear. A native of Seattle, Wong attended U.S.C. film school in hopes of becoming the next Kevin Smith, Michael Bay, or John Woo. “I always felt a little out of place [there] because everyone was like, ‘Ah, yes, Truffaut,’” laughs Wong, an unabashed anti-aesthete, in shapeless baggy jeans and slip-on sandals. After graduating in 2008, he could have gone the film-festival route, but, he says, “you were not hearing about the hot director getting huge deals to do stuff out of the festivals anymore.” At the same time, he saw that YouTubers were building an audience. YouTube, he realized, was “maybe not the place to exhibit feature films but a place to connect people with our work.” With his like-minded friends, he started a kind of collective YouTube channel, making comedy, action, and video-game-inspired shorts that caught on instantly with what Wong calls the “arrested development” quadrant. Before long they were getting four million views per video. “You just couldn’t grasp what that meant,” says Wong. But it meant something to Hulu, which bought the RocketJump series (co-conceived by Wong and his partner Ben Waller): short films, accompanied by a behind-the-scenes how-they-did-it. He’s now contemplating feature-film possibilities, his ultimate dream. “I feel like we cheated … because you read about these other directors, just like, Damn! They paid dues for 10 years before they got to get behind the camera. We cheated because technology was in the right place at the right time, and we were alive at the right age at the right time for us to take advantage of that.”

PLAYING WITH THE BIG BOYS

Despite having millions of young fans, the A-list YouTubers still crave the prestige of traditional media (which has come to include, in their minds, the streaming services Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu). And the Establishment has been only too happy to embrace them, offering them funding and its expertise in storytelling and polish, for a piece of the profit. Cross-pollinations between new and old media are popping up everywhere. The Fine Brothers (14 million subscribers), who make “React Videos,” in which kids react to videos they’re seeing on a computer screen, sold a “React” series to Nickelodeon. YouTube persona “Miranda Sings,” a grotesque and clueless star-on-the-rise (played by Colleen Ballinger-Evans), just landed a scripted series at Netflix. YouTube itself is aiming to be a kind of Netflix for younger people with its new scripted series available through its YouTube Red subscription service. Among its first offerings is the Fine Brothers’ Sing It!, a satire of singing-competition shows, and Scare PewDiePie, in which PewDiePie, 26, the most popular gamer on the planet (41 million subscribers, net worth $16 million), is dropped into unknown, terrifying scenarios.

PewDiePie had been looking to reach a broader audience. Robert Kirkman and David Alpert—the creator and executive producer of AMC’s The Walking Dead—jumped at the chance to provide him with a concept and narrative. “There’s a challenge not to become ossified,” explains Alpert. “Whenever there’s a new form of media that’s especially embraced by the young, the entrenched media tend to resent or belittle it. When rock ‘n’ roll came out, people said, That’s not music. It’s noise.”

Some of the biggest names of Hollywood’s Old Guard are getting in on the game on that same principle. In 2014, Imagine partners Ron Howard and Brian Grazer founded New Form Digital, a mini-studio aimed at making shows around YouTube talents; it has already sold 18 series to digital platforms. Grazer says he sees his company “as the digital extension of what I’ve done in TV and film.” On the movie side, media mogul Peter Chernin and Van Toffler, former head of Viacom Media Network’s music group, funded Supergravity, which is making movies with YouTube stars at a low cost and selling them directly to the consumer through iTunes and video on demand. Their latest was The Chosen, starring 20-year-old YouTube dreamboat Kian Lawley (3.1 million subscribers), about a child-stealing demon. Taryn Southern, a buoyant, 30-year-old veteran of YouTube, who’s a sharp observer of the entire digital culture, puts it this way: “They’re all making these digital movies, not because these people are like Meryl Streep but because these people can sell movies.”

CHANGE THE CHANNEL

For aspiring performers in the traditional realm, a built-in fan base is now deemed as critical to future success as possessing talent. According to UTA’s Weinstein, “One of the questions we get asked now [by studios, networks, and advertisers] is ‘How many Twitter followers do they have? How engaged are they on Facebook?’ … All things being equal—if the digital star is as good an actor as the more traditional performers up for the role or endorsement—the artist who’s got a massive, engaged audience … is going to have a real advantage in landing the job.” When producer Kathleen Grace, who runs New Form Digital, meets young aspiring actors, the first thing she tells them is to cultivate their social-media presence. “If you want to come up high in search results, you best have a YouTube channel,” says Grace. “Show that you have skin in the game. Make a Web series. Show that you’re interested in this world.”

Alas, not every aspiring actor is a natural social-media butterfly; some might even find the whole Look at me! culture off-putting. These skeptics now face an uphill battle. Southern sees her struggling-actor friends who never jumped on the social-media bandwagon now suffering the consequences. “They’re terrified by this,” she says.

Still, it remains to be seen whether these digital creators can actually succeed on Hollywood terms. So far, the biggest star to emerge from YouTube is Rachel Bloom, 28, whose videos led to landing the show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, for which she recently received a Golden Globe. But, it should be noted, she had also been a television writer and comedian. Others haven’t been as lucky. Grace Helbig, the 30-year-old Queen Bee of YouTube, with 2.8 million subscribers, was given her own show to host on E!, but the fans didn’t go there, nor did many other people. YouTube sensation Shane Dawson, 27, who bills himself as an actor, singer, and director (7.1 million subscribers), was given a chance to prove his directing chops on The Chair, a contest show on Starz in which two aspiring movie directors compete to direct a movie based on the same script. Dawson was confident he had what it took—after all, he’d been making videos daily for six years. But critics concluded that his movie, which cost $850,000 to make, was excruciating. Even one of the show’s producers, actor Zachary Quinto, said it was “egregiously offensive” due to its homophobia, misogyny, racism, and unfunny potty humor.

Some of the more important voices from this arena doubt that the digital stars will ever do something significant in the culture at large. Dana Brunetti, a producer of House of Cards, the first show to prove that an Internet service could provide stellar content, says that YouTube “missed their moment” to become like Netflix or Amazon Prime, precisely because of their longtime association with frothy juveniles and focus on clicks. “They could have been big a few years ago. Now no one in my business is taking them seriously.”

That hasn’t stopped the YouTube business from exploding. The field is increasingly crowded, competitive, and frenetic. Four hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Google is stoking the frenzy with its ever expanding number of YouTube spaces across the globe—in Los Angeles, New York, London, Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Mumbai, with plans for Rio and Toronto. Here, young people who’ve made it to 10,000 subscribers can use their soundstages at no cost and get free lessons in top-of-the-line gear, such as Red digital cameras and 360-degree cameras. Its flagship studio, in the Playa Vista area of L.A., is a 41,000-square-foot converted airport hangar, with seven soundstages and elaborate sets. It feels like an old Hollywood studio that’s been handed over to kids—a temple to millennial privilege. At the W Hollywood condos, where Andrew Bachelor lives, a dozen or so viners have moved in, hoping to do “collabs” with him so they can follow in his footsteps.

One can’t help but feel that the innocence and freshness from a decade ago is on the wane. “Now people are doing YouTube as a career move to build an audience, even if they’re only eight,” says Rhett McLaughlin. For all the talk about “authenticity,” social media’s favorite buzzword, it’s all about the views, and popularity can be easily manipulated. “You’ve now got a million and one kids that are all trying to be YouTube stars that know the system, know how to game it,” says Southern. “They understand how to optimize their S.E.O. [search-engine optimization], so they’ll title their videos these salacious titles with the crazy thumbnails to get the clicks. They’re 13, and they know how to tag their videos with all the right stuff!” According to Jocelyn Johnson, who runs VideoInk, a kind of Variety for the digital-star space, only 20 percent of a YouTuber’s subscribers are active: “Just like any system,” she says, “views on YouTube can be ‘gamed’ by buying them or running what is called a TrueView campaign, where videos run like ads across YouTube. If the viewer doesn’t ‘skip’ the video (like they can many regular ads), then it counts as a view.” The most accurate reflection of a fan base, therefore, is the number of likes one gets. According to Southern, it’s often a crushing blow to social-media stars when a photo they post gets 15,000 fewer likes than the last one. In this competitive environment, it’s no wonder that YouTubers today jump at any opportunity to be a virtual sandwich board for brands. They can get paid in six figures to “unbox” merchandise on their channels, and several thousand a month by Amazon to “shout out” recent items they’ve bought on the site.

DOWN THE TUBE

It’s enough to make a veteran like Southern question whether she has the stomach to continue—even though she has a number of digital projects happening, including a movie musical she’s producing with YouTube stars and a new online talk show that’s being funded by Maker, an MCN bought by Disney for $500 million. “There’s this pressure amongst the older crowd that’s been around for a while: How do we keep up with this? I feel like it’s just an insane world. Five years from now, I don’t want to be turning out videos and I don’t want to be feeling like I have to keep up with my fan base and stay young,” says Southern. Gaby Dunn, who has a channel, “Just Between Us,” about friendships, which has half a million subscribers, recently hit a similar mid-career crisis when she realized that her job may not be financially sustainable. She might have shared her doubts on her site, but, as she recently wrote in an article on Fusion.net, “authenticity is valued, but in small doses: YouTubers are allowed to have struggled in the past tense, because overcoming makes us brave and relatable. But we can’t be struggling now or we’re labeled ‘whiners.’ ”

Perhaps Southern and her ilk will be able to muster the energy to push through if one of these stars breaks out in a big way and emerges as a model: if King Bach does become the next Will Smith, if Freddie Wong does emerge as the next John Woo, if My Gay Roommate becomes the next Will & Grace. Until that happens, Southern seems to be warding off a psychic crisis. “YouTube is the perfect example of how democracy is not always better,” she says. “The populist opinion is not always the best one. You can chart algorithms all day long. YouTube can give boosts to people who have longer watch times and more frequent video uploads. That doesn’t make the content better.” And then there is a larger, more existential question: between the loss of conversation and real family time, and the elevation of narcissism as a personality trait, one wonders whether social media have done more harm in this world than good. Southern sits back, sighs, and ponders what she’s going to do that day and for the rest of her life: “It’s such a chaotic world right now. Do I really need to be adding to the noise?”

Among those who don’t actually know him personally, hating producer Dana Brunetti has become something of a blood sport in Hollywood. He’s youngish (42), he’s cute, and, as anyone who’s seen his Facebook or Twitter posts knows, his life is basically awesome. Members of an unofficial Brunetti-watch club e-mail one another with his more cringe-worthy posts, such as “My Gold Level Starbucks card arrived the same day as my Golden Globe. Coincidence? I don’t think so.” And “[Fifty Shades of Grey author] E. L. James called to invite me to something in June. Doesn’t she know I don’t even know what I’m doing next week, much less in June?” On the now defunct Humblebrag Twitter feed, started by the late comedy writer Harris Wittels, “Brunetti was an M.V.P.,” says one appreciator, “even when his tweets weren’t technically ‘humble.’ ” But what really rankles some Hollywood folk is his résumé, which suggests that if he keeps at it he could be the next Scott Rudin. In a landscape dominated by mind-numbing, big-budget tentpole movies, he’s produced two recent films—The Social Network and Captain Phillips—that earned Oscar nominations, got critical raves, and turned big profits, a combination that’s becoming increasingly rare. He has also helped change the face of entertainment delivery systems with the Netflix streaming series House of Cards. He’s proved he can dominate the box office, with Fifty Shades of Grey, which grossed $564 million worldwide. On top of that he can now add studio head to his résumé. In January, along with his business partner, Kevin Spacey, he swept in to save Relativity, Ryan Kavanaugh’s studio that had recently crashed and nearly burned.

His producing stories from the battlefield are littered with scenes that might have been straight out of Entourage: Vegas blowouts, networking at the Playboy Mansion, even a drunken pitch session. He’s almost unable to utter a sentence without using the f-word. (A word search of the first two hours of my interview with him turns up 94 instances of it.) He’s not afraid of openly calling people assholes or of giving a good public smackdown: when Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan, the young stars of Fifty Shades of Grey, started making noise about wanting big raises for the sequel, he didn’t hold back in The Hollywood Reporter, saying, “I’m not going to cry for anybody who wants to be in this business just because a thing they were involved in did very well and they didn’t get paid [a lot]. That’s not the deal that you made. If it was, I’d have more than a couple Ferraris because all the money my films have made is f—ing insane.”

Ah yes, the Ferraris. At home in Los Feliz, he has three, along with two Teslas, two vintage Mustangs, a BMW i8, and a Prius. It’s enough to make Mike De Luca, a producing partner and one of his best friends, cringe at times. “I go to his house. I’m half jealous … but then I’m also like, Why? I think it’s weird to have eight cars in your driveway.”

Then again, there’s a reason that De Luca, 50, immediately fell so hard for Brunetti that De Luca’s wife now calls him Mike’s “other wife.” In a town full of people exchanging gift baskets and then slagging one another off behind their backs, Brunetti, De Luca says, is a refreshing straight shooter. “He doesn’t tiptoe around things,” he says. “He doesn’t have a separate face for public consumption. He isn’t one person in private and one person in public. What you see is what you get.” He adds, “I recognized in him qualities that I need more of.”

Likewise, Spacey, who gave Brunetti his first Hollywood job, as his personal assistant, appreciated Brunetti’s “common sense and his bullshit radar” and found in him a rare tenacity. “He sets his sights on something and goes at achieving it with full commitment,” says Spacey. Indeed, by all accounts, Brunetti is a master of the art of persuasion—or as Ben Mezrich, author of The Accidental Billionaires, which became the movie The Social Network, puts it, “He has an incredible knack for getting people to do things.”

SOUTHERN DISCOMFORT

Perhaps it’s because Brunetti hustled his way to the Hollywood big time out of nowhere. From his office in downtown L.A., carefully festooned with a life-size Star Wars storm trooper, art-film posters, and a treadmill, he shares his story. Initially he hesitates, noting that he feels like he’s in one of his therapy sessions. He then decides, “I don’t care. I’ll give you all the dirt.” His voice is quiet but intense, with the slightest hint of a southern drawl. His look is metrosexual: super-trim beard, dark jeans, checked shirt, Louis Vuitton hiking boots.

He grew up dirt-poor in the paper-mill town of Covington, Virginia, the kind of “backwards town,” he says, “where basically everybody marries their high-school sweetheart, stays there, goes to work at the local mill, and no one gets out.” His mother left his father, a mailman, when Dana was a baby. There were visits, once a year, but he never felt any connection to her. Along the way, there were two stepmothers, assorted siblings, a half-sibling, and step-siblings. At the age of 11 he started working after school until midnight: mowing lawns, doing a paper route, and working at Cucci’s pizzeria. “Once I started making money, my parents [father and stepmother] were like, ‘School clothes, all that, you buy all of that [yourself].’ Which in a weird way has probably worked to my advantage because it’s part of my drive now. But psychologically and emotionally, it fucking sucked.”

“He worked so hard because he wanted out,” says his high-school girlfriend Amy, who still lives there. “You knew he was going to do something with his life.”

When Brunetti turned 18, life started sucking even harder. On his birthday, he nearly lost an eye waterskiing when the ski rope snapped. He says he spent two weeks in the hospital, only to come home to find his belongings packed up and the walls bare. He was getting kicked out. Sure, he was “a pain in the ass,” he admits, but nothing out of the ordinary for Covington. After spending a chunk of time living out of his car and couch-surfing, he moved in with Amy. But they were a combustible pair and spent most of their time at each other’s throat.

His father let him come back home on the condition that he go to family counseling. He agreed, and in an early session his father dropped the heavy news that his mother had left the family for a woman. Dana “pretty violently” fled the room, and moved to Pennsylvania to sleep on his sister’s couch, traumatized. “In the mountains of Virginia, [a gay relationship] doesn’t happen,” he explains.

A couple of months later, Amy called to tell him she was pregnant, at which point, he says, “I knew I had to get my shit together.” Her father, whom he considered more of a father figure than his own, encouraged him to go into the military. Moved by a Coast Guard rescue scene in Top Gun, Brunetti thought it could be cool. He ended up joining the Coast Guard because one of his brothers was in it, and because of a childhood poster he’d had of a 44-foot Coast Guard lifeboat crashing through a wave, which he thought was “fucking awesome.”

He was stationed at Jones Beach, on Long Island. Though Brunetti stresses the amount of sitting around he did, his former Coast Guard buddy Rob Asma attests to Brunetti’s heroics, such as the time their crew came upon a boat with no one on it. At first they wanted to move on, but Brunetti “pushed it,” says Asma, “[insisting,] ‘We need to search for this person!’ ” Sure enough they found the guy, the waves crashing down upon him. “Dana pulled him out,” says Asma. “The guy was moments away from dying.” Meanwhile, during his downtime, Brunetti honed his charm skills. According to Asma, “When we’d go out, he was so good at meeting people, getting us into places. He would talk the police into giving him rides places, almost chauffeuring him around.”

But then, a bombshell: while in the Coast Guard, he’d been receiving reports and sonogram photos from Amy of their future baby boy, whom they would name Brandon. Then one day, she admitted that the baby could be another guy’s instead (Amy says they were separated at the time). She asked that he sign paperwork giving Brandon her last name, but Brunetti balked. “I said, ‘I think it would be in the best interest of Brandon if he knew who his father was, and I’d be happy to sign this once that’s determined.” As it turned out, a paternity test showed Brandon was not his. Brunetti was pissed at first, “but after I got over that, it was a huge fucking relief. It was like, bullet dodged.” Even Amy, who still has affection for him, says, “I look back on his life and I think, Thank God. I know that sounds awful but thank God it wasn’t his. He would not be where he is today. As much as I wanted him to be the father.”

WATCH THIS SPACE

He was now a free man. After Brunetti’s four-year tour with the Coast Guard, another iconic 80s movie hotshot inspired his next move: Charlie Sheen in Wall Street, “this guy who came from nothing to living in this amazing apartment and the Hamptons…. If it can happen in movies, it can happen for real.” Alas, after getting his stockbroker’s license, Brunetti ended up not in a high-stakes, white-shoe firm but at a pair of sleazeball operations, straight out of The Wolf of Wall Street. “They were all fucking shady places,” he says. “We were basically legalized thieves.” In 1996, through a Coast Guard friend, he went legit, and became a salesman for a start-up called Omnipoint, which was setting up one of the first digital wireless networks in the Northeast. He rose through the ranks as the company grew to 2,000 people. Life was already more than he could have imagined possible back in Covington. But in 1997 he met the man who opened the door to something even more interesting.

An antiques-dealer friend invited Brunetti to a dinner, and Spacey was among the group. Brunetti was then 24, hungry, and ready for anything. Spacey had just been in L.A. Confidential (though Brunetti didn’t recognize him) and would soon be on his way to London for a theatrical production of The Iceman Cometh. He needed an assistant for the three months that he’d be there. As Brunetti recalls, Spacey semi-jokingly said, “When you get your shit together, you should come and be my assistant.” In true Brunetti form, he replied, “Fuck you. I’ve got two assistants running around for me. I’m not going to be your assistant.” Then late one night in the office he took a long, hard look at his supervisor, a middle-aged guy who commuted from New Jersey every day. “I just remember going, I don’t want to be that guy when I’m 40.” He called Spacey to see if the job was still open.

Brunetti had only been out of the country once and had never seen professional theater. From the start his new boss included him on everything—from “rolling calls” (Hollywoodspeak for going down a list of people to get on the line for your boss to talk to) to observing rehearsals. They stayed in London longer than expected, as Spacey fell in love with the Old Vic and dedicated himself to saving it from being turned into a nightclub. They returned to the States for Spacey to film American Beauty, and Brunetti soaked in every aspect of it, from the cinematography to the grassroots marketing campaign to the Academy Awards, when Brunetti went as Spacey’s plus-one. The movie won in five categories: best picture, best director, best actor, best cinematography, and best original screenplay.

Three Spacey movies down the line, however, Brunetti started to feel assistant burnout. He told Spacey it was time for him to leave. Not wanting to lose him, Spacey (who had a small production company in Los Angeles called Trigger Street) urged him to take some time off and come up with a new role that might make him stick around. Brunetti mulled over some ideas, focusing on the future of technology, one of his obsessions. He came up with Triggerstreet.com, an online platform for aspiring writers and filmmakers to upload and critique one another’s work through a then new and little-known technology called “streaming.”

Brunetti was loving life. He had the cool new job and was living in Tribeca with a new girlfriend, Johanna Argan, a costume designer (with whom he’d have a daughter, Estella, years later). But then Spacey called with a small request. The head of his production company was leaving. Would Brunetti join him in Los Angeles for a week or two so that they could look for a replacement? Brunetti agreed, though he made it clear that he had no intention of leaving New York, which Spacey accepted. Instead, says Brunetti, “I was here [in L.A.] for a week. [Kevin] left and went to London and said, ‘Good luck. The company’s yours.’ He basically shanghaied me into coming here. We didn’t get along for about a year and a half.”

An epic communication failure ensued, and they ended up putting out a bunch of movies that Brunetti despised. (He won’t say which, but you’ve never heard of them anyway.) Thinking Spacey was in charge, “I would send these scripts to Kevin to get his feedback on it. And he’d be like, ‘Yeah, that’s great. We should do it.’ And so I’d be like, ‘O.K.’ And I’d put all my force behind it, and I would get these projects made. And … they sucked.” Dispirited, he went to London to discuss with Spacey their future together and to complain about the recent projects that he hated. Spacey admitted that he felt the same. “Well, why the fuck then did you say let’s do it and that you liked it?” Brunetti asked. Spacey replied, “I thought you liked it, and I was just trying to be supportive of you.” “I’m like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ ” From that moment on, Spacey told him, he had the freedom to run the company as he wanted.

PLAY YOUR CARDS RIGHT

Brunetti’s first real solo endeavor sprang from an addiction he’d developed to blackjack—and he felt there was a movie in there, somewhere. As it happened, he came across an article in Wired about a group of M.I.T. students who learned how to count cards and made millions in Las Vegas. Before even reading it, Brunetti knew this was it. He called the article’s author, Ben Mezrich, and made the pitch for an option. Mezrich, who had a book coming out on the subject, asked how much he would be paid—at the time he was majorly in debt, having blown through $2 million on a lifestyle bender (first-class travel, clothing, fancy hotels). Brunetti replied, “Zero.” Mezrich said he was coming to L.A. soon—could they meet and discuss? Brunetti replied, How about the Playboy Mansion? “It had a great effect,” admits Mezrich. So much so that when New Line came to Mezrich with an offer of $750,000 for the book, Brunetti persuaded him to turn it down. “Remember how fast you went through two million dollars? Just think how fast you’ll go through $750,000,” Brunetti told him, adding that if the movie got made it would change his life. “It was the perfect pitch for where I was in my life,” says Mezrich. His agent thought he was crazy.

Mezrich signed on with Brunetti, and Brunetti eventually partnered with De Luca, a veteran producer, who had a deal with Sony. He was recovering from a major flameout with a string of flops at New Line. Titled 21, the blackjack movie had a fair reception, but it led to the next movie, which would change the careers of all three men. Just prior to the release of 21, Mezrich shared with Brunetti the idea for his next book: the making of Facebook. Brunetti was skeptical that it would make a good movie … until Mezrich told him the story of Eduardo Saverin, Mark Zuckerberg’s co-founder, whom Zuckerberg tried to push out of the company. Now this was something. There was only one problem—Saverin was still reluctant to tell the whole story of his experiences at Facebook.

Brunetti would not let that stand in his way and began a mad courtship of Saverin, luring the “Harvard nerd,” as he puts it, into his Hollywood entourage, with flattery, girls, alcohol, and celebrity. Step One was inviting him to a mini-premiere of 21 in Boston. When the party photographer wanted to take a picture of Brunetti and a Hollywood agent, Brunetti pulled Saverin into the shot and identified him as “ ‘Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook.’ First time he’d ever been photographed or labeled the co-founder of Facebook,” claims Brunetti. “He loved that.” He’d heard that Saverin (who now lives in Singapore) had a thing for Asian women and, through Mezrich’s wife, rustled up one Lisa Wu, “a cute little Asian girl,” who worked at Intel (and went on to get a Ph.D. in computer architecture at Columbia). “I was like, ‘Let’s get a bottle of whiskey over here!’ We all got sloshed.” But still Saverin wouldn’t spill the whole story. Brunetti stepped it up a notch. A couple of weeks later, he invited Saverin to the real premiere of 21, in Las Vegas, followed by a “fucking insane” after-party at Planet Hollywood, and pulled out his big friend: Kevin Spacey. “This was the moment to strike. This is how I used Kevin. I use him like an arrow. If I need to get to somebody, I fire him at them…. We ended up hanging out—me, Kevin, Ben, and Eduardo. And that’s when Eduardo started to talk to us and give Ben what he needed.” Soon after, Sony e-mailed Brunetti, who was at the end of a boozy lunch, to say they wanted to hear the pitch again. That night he conferenced Mezrich on the phone with Sony and gave the pitch again. Sony bought the project on the spot. “I don’t know what I said,” Brunetti says, “but Ben told me, ‘Dude, you should do every pitch drunk.’ ”

But two weeks later Sony called to say that they’d hit a snag: Mezrich’s book proposal had been leaked onto the Internet, and independently, Rudin had come across it. He already had Amy Pascal, then Sony’s head of motion pictures, on board and Aaron Sorkin lined up to write it. A more cautious producer might have backed away, not wanting to burn bridges with such powerful Hollywood veterans. But Brunetti went into fighter mode. He told the Sony executive, “This is my fucking property. First rule of producing is you control the property. I fucking control the property.” After lawyers got involved, Sony brought the parties together. But still Brunetti felt that the fight for control wasn’t over. When news broke in the trades about the project, Rudin was the only one getting producer credit. At 11 P.M., Brunetti banged out a pissed-off e-mail telling Rudin, whom he had just met, that he wasn’t going to let himself be steamrolled. He promptly got a call from De Luca, whom he’d copied along with Pascal on the e-mail, wondering what the hell he was doing. “You’re fucking going to start World War III,” De Luca told him.

It was the kind of hotheaded behavior De Luca had tried to stave off before, and continues to. “A lot of things happen in the daily life of producers that annoy the shit out of us. It’s very easy to go off on things. But it doesn’t get you anywhere,” he says. “I’ve had this speech with him multiple times. I don’t know if it’s sunk in.”

Indeed, regret certainly hit Brunetti that night. After getting scolded by De Luca and the studio for picking a fight with the producer, he started Googling Rudin, coming across tales of his notoriously ruthless behavior with less important people. “Oh, fuck. What did I do?” Brunetti recalls thinking. He spent the night tossing and turning, certain he’d just blown his big chance. At four that morning, he got an e-mail from Rudin. He opened it with dread. According to Brunetti, Rudin told him that he understood his point. (Rudin declined to comment for this article.) Brunetti compares the moment to a lesson learned in the military: “There were some people there that would walk all over you until you stood up to them.”

Rudin would partner with him and De Luca again, two years later, for Captain Phillips, based on the true story of an American sea captain whose ship was hijacked by Somalian pirates. Nabbing the rights to the Phillips story also required hustling. Brunetti and De Luca—along with every producer in town—had been watching the real events unfold on the news, and waiting to pounce once the situation was resolved. The evening the captain was rescued, Brunetti, feeling sufficiently vulturous, called Phillips’s home, only to be hung up on. “I was just like, I’m such a slimeball. But I’m like, Fuck it, I’ve got to do it.” He persevered, got in there first, and eventually earned the captain’s trust. For various reasons, Phillips wasn’t a fan of the Coast Guard, but Brunetti had undeniable sea cred. This time, when Rudin spoke to the trades about getting rights to the story, he described it this way: “That wasn’t me, it was Dana Brunetti and Mike De Luca. They did it entirely themselves.”

MADE IN THE SHADE

Brunetti was earning the respect and trust of the major players in his orbit. In 2011, House of Cards was making the rounds in Hollywood with David Fincher attached as director, and Spacey and Brunetti as its producers. Brunetti was with Spacey in Malibu when Fincher called them to report on the offer from Netflix—then still best known as a DVD-rental company. Putting a major series on a streaming platform was a first, but according to Brunetti, the notion was a perfect extension of what he’d started at Triggerstreet.com, which, he claims, was one of the first streaming services. Spacey didn’t get it. ’ ‘Wait, so we’re going to do this on DVD?’ ” Brunetti recalls him asking. Brunetti made his pitch: this was where things were heading. And if we can do it now, we can be the first. According to Brunetti, Spacey replied to Fincher, “Well, Dana’s saying do it. Let’s do it.”

Given Brunetti’s penchant for making such self-assured claims, some would want to smack him down. Recently, in an exchange made public on WikiLeaks between Pascal and Brunetti’s fellow series producer Josh Donen, Donen griped that, in an interview with Fast Company, Brunetti had overstated his involvement in House of Cards. “He had NOTHING to do with Netflix and wasn’t in any meeting with them. EVER.” Donen added that Brunetti was “one of a kind … thank God.” After Brunetti found the exchange, he e-mailed Donen: “Look, say it to my face if you have a problem with me…. It’s pretty fucked up you would go to the head of the studio … and talk shit behind my back.” (According to Brunetti, Donen “manned up” and apologized.)

Still, Brunetti’s reputation as an uncanny authority would grow, and would soon lead to the unlikeliest of offers: to produce the adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey. He was stunned when his agent called him to say that Universal—the studio that had won the bidding war over the rights—wondered if he’d meet with the author to discuss producing it. He asked his agent, “What about me and what I’ve done makes you think I’m the right producer for Fifty Shades of Grey?” Nevertheless, he and De Luca, who had his own, literary take on the book, decided to take a swing at it, and won the job over numerous other producers. The book’s author, E. L. James (whose real name is Erika Mitchell), was given the unusual position as a producer and was on set every day. As has been reported, James and the director, Sam Taylor-Johnson, clashed throughout production, with James insisting the movie remain as true to the book as possible, to please the fans. As De Luca recalls, “Erika was in a pretty heightened state of anxiety throughout production.” It could have been a disaster had she not hit it off with Brunetti. “He was a great Erika whisperer,” De Luca says. “He knew how to contextualize any debate that came up. In an odd sense, he was a peacemaker worthy of Jimmy Carter.”

Alas for the Dana-haters, life couldn’t be better for him—both personally and professionally. He’s the doting father of three-year-old Estella; though he and Argan split up three years ago, they remain great friends and share custody. Professionally, he’s just made the kind of bold move that makes the earth shake in Hollywood.

In recent months, Brunetti and Spacey had been discussing the next steps for Trigger Street. Focusing on television, they signed a deal at Fox. (Their first project is The Residence, based on the book by Kate Andersen Brower, about the inner workings of the White House staff.) But the movie side was becoming increasingly restrictive, because they could no longer rely on studio funding for the kinds of movies they wanted to make. Could they build their own distribution network? Could they find their own funding? They had the reputation, they reasoned; all they needed was the infrastructure. The answer came in the unlikely form of Ryan Kavanaugh, who was struggling to take his beleaguered mini-studio, Relativity, out of Chapter 11, for which it had filed in July. In October, Kavanaugh, who had kicked in some money for 21 and The Social Network, invited Brunetti to his office to see if he and Spacey might be interested in saving him, in exchange for running his studio. Kavanaugh would be the C.E.O., Spacey the chairman, and Brunetti the president, making all the creative decisions.

Who cared that they were partnering with a former Hollywood bad boy—with two D.U.I. arrests and a probation violation—who’d run his studio into the ground. The two pride themselves on going against conventional wisdom. Indeed, Spacey said in a statement, “They thought we were crazy when we chose to do House of Cards with an online streaming service. They thought I was crazy when I went to run the Old Vic Theatre, when no one thought it could be saved; and this move with Relativity will be proof for some that we really are crazy.”

As for Brunetti, he says, “A lot of people might have viewed Relativity as a scorched-earth barren wasteland…. I ignore all that. It’s all going to come down to the product we’re putting out.” He won’t discuss a single detail about where Relativity’s new funding will come from, but is confident he’ll be able to make the kind of mid-budget, non-tentpole movies that once made Hollywood interesting, and that are, sadly, in increasingly short supply.

Even the Dana-haters love movies too much to argue with that.

It’s unintentional, mind you, but Alicia Vikander does the Luckiest Girl Alive thing effortlessly. Even doing an interview by Skype—her preferred mode of communication with far-flung friends these days—can’t conceal it. It’s 10 A.M. in Sydney, Australia, and she’s puttering around the house of her boyfriend, actor Michael Fassbender. (He’s decamped there to shoot Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant. She’s on a two-week holiday between film sets.) Her hair has that just-out-of-the-shower look. She’s wearing a light-blue button-down shirt that, even if it isn’t her boyfriend’s, looks like it should be. She’s making the kind of breakfast that elegant, health-conscious European women eat: a mix of muesli and yogurt, accompanied by a beverage of fresh-squeezed lemon juice mixed with apple-cider vinegar that some holistic-minded Australian friends are crazy about. “It’s apparently very good for you, but it’s disgusting!” says Vikander. Unlike the typical person, whose face over Skype looks as if he or she were staring into a doorknob, Vikander looks as exquisite and glowing as ever.

This past year has been her year, as they say—the 27-year-old Swedish actress, who now lives in London, shot from relative obscurity to international superstardom with four major films in just 12 months—Testament of Youth, Ex Machina, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and The Danish Girl—the kind of feat that Jessica Chastain accomplished a couple of years ago. Vikander was the “It girl” of this past awards season, earning a best-actress Golden Globe nomination for her role as an intensely alluring robot in Ex Machina and winning the Oscar for best supporting actress in The Danish Girl, as Gerda Wegener, the wild and determined wife of one of the earliest men to undergo gender-confirmation surgery, played by Eddie Redmayne. She’s both a muse to modern fashion designers—a year ago she became the new face of Louis Vuitton—and a dream for costume designers doing lush period dramas. No one has worn romantic, charming period frocks with such conviction since Helena Bonham Carter, as Lucy Honeychurch, frolicked in the grass in A Room with a View.

Now the world is at her feet, and she’s picking out projects according to nothing but whim and personal passion. A pair of guilty-pleasure blockbusters? Check. She’s currently in Jason Bourne, opposite Matt Damon, and she’s gearing up to play Lara Croft in the next Tomb Raider movie. A venture with an iconic European director? Another check: Wim Wenders’s Submergence, opposite James McAvoy, which she’s just wrapped. An indie with an old friend? She got that too: Euphoria, directed by Lisa Langseth, the woman who discovered her. It also happens to be the first title from her film company, Vikarious Productions, which she started, well, in order to do exactly what she wants.

But first, there’s the Oscar-bait film with movie-star boyfriend: The Light Between Oceans, out in September, about a lighthouse keeper and his wife, who, grieving from two recent miscarriages, discover a baby who washes ashore in a rowboat and make the disastrous decision to raise her as their own. Directed by Derek Cianfrance (Blue Valentine, A Place Beyond the Pines), it’s the kind of wrenching adult melodrama that Hollywood rarely makes these days, because it’s hard to pull off successfully—although they got this one right. It’s also where she and Fassbender fell in love. All of it is so absurdly charmed, and Vikander is still wrapping her head around it. “Hollywood was like a rumor,” she says, musing on how far she’s come. “I and my mum, we’d set the alarm to two A.M. to watch the Oscars, and it was like a window onto another universe. And then to have her there next to me [at the Oscars] this year. We were just cursing in Swedish. . . . It’s been pretty fucking . . . Wow.”

To those who’ve worked with her, Vikander is such a rare force of nature that the only way she could have remained in Swedish obscurity would have been if she’d made a concerted effort to do so. Co-stars and past directors tell a similar story—one that begins with instant enchantment by some kind of ineffable star quality. “I was just beguiled by her!” says Joe Wright, director of Anna Karenina—a reaction that’s rather typical from her collaborators. Their admiration deepens as they witness Vikander’s perfectionist tenacity, born from years of ballet training. “In dance, you do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again, until you get it right,” says Redmayne. “The pain of ballet to get to the beauty. She brings that absolute rigor and absolute desire to give the very best.” Finally, and most powerfully, it’s about the emotional passion that she unleashes in a scene, all the more disarming due to her physical pristineness. As Redmayne puts in, “There’s this other thing that has nothing to do with her technical brilliance. A kind of deep emotion and capacity to feel that is volcanic.”

“Hollywood was like a rumor,” Vikander says. “Like a window onto another universe.”

These two forces—rigorous determination and devil-may-care abandon—seem to be roiling about inside her. Which adds up to someone who’s more down to earth than she appears. True, she possesses a physical poise in pictures and on-screen that can be distancing or make her seem prissy or haughty. And yet in real life she has a big laugh and is surprisingly chatty—even a bit rambling. One might be interested to learn that she’s not afraid to tell a story with her mouth full of yogurt and that she carries around the retro dice game Yahtzee in her handbag. She’s private about her romance with Michael Fassbender, yet she’s been known to have a girlish enthusiasm for sharing naughty tidbits. “You might not think you can tease her, but she kind of likes to be teased,” says Wright. He recalls of their time making Anna Karenina, “She had a new boyfriend at the time, and she’d come in rather sloshed on Monday mornings. She had a little chafing on her chin from all the kissing she’d been doing on the weekend. I’d tease her about that. And I’d tease her about being a perfectionist as well. I really appreciate and admire her perfectionism, but it’s important that we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”
Photograph by Mario Testino. Styled by Jessica Diehl.

Body Language

In many ways, Vikander had an upbringing that was tailor-made for creating a young actress. Her parents, Maria and Svante, divorced when she was a baby, and Alicia divided her time between them. Maria was a company member at the state theater, which provided a kind of collective creative playground for Alicia. She performed small roles there as a child. Svante, a psychiatrist, was, evidently, something of a ladies’ man—with a total of six children, from four different marriages. Like Alicia, these half-siblings were constantly coming and going between their father and respective mothers, and one can imagine the vying for attention that took place. At the age of four, she took up ballet. It wasn’t serious at first—just the result of a little girl’s desire to wear a tutu. But by nine, she was studying dance at the Royal Swedish Ballet School and was, almost without realizing it, on the path to becoming a serious dancer. This wasn’t anything like the bohemian playground of her childhood but rather a new universe of perfectionism, pain, anxiety, and self-doubt. She didn’t even think she was especially pretty. “My image of myself was not the best,” she says. “Being in ballet school and being in leotards in front of a mirror I don’t know how many hours a day was quite tough.” The stress landed her in therapy, which she hid from her parents.

She found relief in the form of acting when, at age 16, she was cast in a mini-series. But her hopes were dashed when she applied to, and got rejected by, the local drama school. She applied to law school, thinking the verdict was in. Then, one day, while working at a Levi’s store, she got a call from a casting director. A Swedish film director, Lisa Langseth, was looking for a girl to star in Pure, about a deeply troubled young woman whose only solace is classical music and who falls in love with an older, rather cruel conductor. After reading for Langseth numerous times, Vikander landed the part—one that called for remarkable darkness and savage rage. She fairly attacked it, and it unleashed a kind of cathartic dark thrill. She realized, “In film you get the license to try and go for emotions that you normally try to keep away from you . . . [but] certain emotions that you fear are [actually] very close to you.” Recently, Vikander re-watched that first film and thought, “Wow, where did I get that from? I really don’t know.”

Vikander’s performance won Sweden’s official film award (the Guldbagge) and caught the attention of some European casting directors. Alas, that took her as far as … Denmark. Danish filmmaker Nikolaj Arcel had been looking to cast the lead in A Royal Affair, based on the real-life story of Caroline Matilda, who was married to the mentally ill King Christian VII of Denmark and had a tragic affair with his doctor. Arcel says he’d looked at “every single actress between 16 and 35 in Denmark” (which, while impressive-sounding, let’s face it, couldn’t have taken all that long) before widening the pool to Sweden and Norway. “As soon as I saw her [on the tape] even just standing there, even before she started to speak, I was like, That’s her!” There was one small issue—Vikander didn’t actually speak any Danish. When she did start speaking, “it was completely nonsensical,” says Arcel. “And yet she didn’t hold back at all. She was full-on emotional.” Vikander studied Danish over the next eight weeks to learn enough to do the role. But true to her perfectionist nature, she was convinced that she was failing. “I think now I was terrified,” she says. “By Week Six, the nerves were taking over, and [I thought], I’m not going to get it.” By shoot time, she’d nailed it. The movie received an Oscar nomination for best foreign-language film.

Alicia’s “commitment made me focus and make sure I was as committed,” says Fassbender.

Conquering the world of English-language films was another matter. For a memorable stint following A Royal Affair, Vikander embraced the life of a struggling artist, in all its scrappy, bohemian glory. She moved from Stockholm to London, where she shared an apartment with three Swedish girlfriends, who were all aspiring pop singers: Caroline Hjelt and Aino Jawo of the duo Icona Pop, and Tove Lo. (No doubt, they were the hottest Swedish rooming group ever to hit London.) The apartment spilled onto Portobello Market, so the kitchen was infested with rats. “It was the dirtiest bachelorette pad you’ve ever seen,” Vikander says. The four girls shared two beds and all their clothes, which they kept in a pile on the floor. She auditioned, unsuccessfully, for Snow White and the Huntsman and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She made 15 “self-tapes” for various American television pilots and got completely ignored. “I didn’t even get a ‘No,’ ” she says—her first taste of Hollywood.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Finally, a break came her way. Director Joe Wright was planning an adaptation of Anna Karenina that would be highly stylized, “a ballet with words,” he says. While Wright was searching for an actress to play Kitty, Vikander’s dancing background was key to getting considered. “Dancers have this incredible discipline and rigor,” he says. “Their feet are bleeding, and still they have these serene faces.” But it was her raw performance in Pure that sealed his decision to cast her. The film would set in motion nonstop film work—including some projects with famous actors which nonetheless turned out to be disappointments: Son of a Gun (with Ewan McGregor), Seventh Son (with Julianne Moore and Jeff Bridges), The Fifth Estate, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. She had a breakout of sorts in Testament of Youth, in which she played English pacifist Vera Brittain. But while generally well reviewed, the film never quite broke free from the predictable British period-piece mold.

It was not until Alex Garland’s script for Ex Machina landed in her lap that she had the kind of material that would make her a movie star. The plot revolved around a computer analyst charged with administering a Turing test to an alluring female android. In fact, “Is the really hot droid human?” was the central dramatic question—one that any actress would love to sink her teeth into. The role of Ava called for an enormous amount of physical control and precise movements. Yet just beneath her perfect surface she had to suggest that she had real feelings. Vikander pulled off the balance exquisitely, and it earned her a Golden Globe nomination for best supporting actress.

If Ex Machina was about an exacting balancing act, Tom Hooper’s The Danish Girl would call on her emotional abandon. No one involved was quite prepared for how much Vikander would internalize Gerda, who tackles every emotion—from silliness to rage to undying compassion—as her husband, Einar, attempts to undergo the first known gender-confirmation therapy. Yet the audition might have suggested it. In the scene she read, Gerda confronts Einar, after having seen him—dressed in public for the first time as Lili Elbe—kissing a man at the ball. Redmayne, who’d already been cast, recalls, “The camera was by my head. We read the scene, and got to the end of the scene. I was waiting for Tom [Hooper] to call ‘Cut.’ I looked over to my right, and there he was, gently sobbing.”

“The audition moved me to tears to an almost embarrassing extent,” admits Hooper. “Eddie was like, ‘You’re so busted. There’s no way you’re not going to cast her if she made you cry on the first take.’ I’m like, ‘No, no. I’m—it’s just a bit of allergy. I’m fine.’ ”

In The Light Between Oceans, based on a full-on weepie best-seller by M. L. Stedman that had director Derek Cianfrance crying on the C train in Brooklyn when he finished it, there was, likewise, no room for restraint. In his search for an actress to play Isabel—a woman so filled with grief that stealing a baby seems like the only option—he says, “I was looking for someone who had no filters. Isabel, if she loves you, she’s going to ask you to marry her. If she finds a baby at sea, she’s going to keep it. If she hates you, she’s never going to speak to you again.” Vikander’s major films had not yet come out when Cianfrance was doing the casting, so he was not familiar with her work. He recalls, “She didn’t come in there caked with makeup, trying to impress me. She came in there trying to explore something.” The audition lasted four hours. “She absolutely laid it all bare. Sometimes you meet with actors and they don’t want to embarrass themselves. They don’t want to fail. Alicia immediately came out with so much faith and trust and bravery.” (Note to readers: the word “brave” came up so many times in reference to Vikander that I couldn’t not include it in this piece.)

As is his wont, Cianfrance orchestrated the experience to be as immersive, and as full of odd surprises, as possible for his cast. For that reason, he decided not to show Vikander any photographs of the location—a lighthouse on breathtaking Cape Campbell, one of the most northeasterly points of South Island, New Zealand, well away from civilization. Instead, he had another idea in mind. At two A.M., Vikander, who was staying in the city of Dunedin, was woken up by a crew member, put in a car, and then blindfolded. “I was like, ‘What are you guys doing?!’ ” she recalls. Told it was Derek’s idea, she was driven off.

They arrived on set at the lighthouse, with Vikander still blindfolded. “They put me in a woodshed. There were no windows. They put me in my clothes and my hair.” She was told by a crew member, “I’m going to open this door in 16 minutes now, and then you are going to see a small film crew somewhere. . . . Derek just wants you to do whatever you want to do.” They opened the door two minutes before the sun came up. “I saw the lighthouse and this amazing sea,” recalls Vikander, “and I was crawling up onto this hill where the lighthouse was because I saw the camera crew there. And then when I got up, it was the ocean on the other side of the hill and the sun came up. And I had never seen such nature in my entire life. So it’s a bit silly when I see that take in the film. And I’m like, ‘Oh my God, that’s just not acting. That’s just me being like, ‘Oh my God!’ ”

The next surprise was learning that she, Fassbender, and a handful of crew were going to actually live at the lighthouse for the next month. Fassbender was reluctant, thinking, “Is that necessary?” But Vikander didn’t question it. “She doesn’t take anything for granted,” says Fassbender. “With a lot of these actresses coming out, there’s this bravery that you don’t see so much in male actors. . . . I noticed this as well with Lupita [Nyong’o] in 12 Years a Slave—this focus and understanding that there’s an opportunity given to you and you grab it.” Vikander’s determination to get Isabel right inspired Fassbender, an actor who hardly needs improvement, to up his game. “She doesn’t mind taking a character she’s playing to an ugly place. Her level of commitment made me focus and make sure I was as committed.”

Labor of Love

The gorgeous, smart, and wildly talented Vikander meets her on-screen husband, the gorgeous, smart, and wildly talented Fassbender. Is it any surprise what developed? Vikander was still feeling like a newcomer compared with Fassbender and remembers feeling “terrified and very alone” at the beginning of the shoot. As it happened, Fassbender had already been well aware of Vikander, having seen her dancing at a party at the Toronto Film Festival the year before. She quickly discovered that he wanted her help in finding his footing. “He was very sweet at letting me in. . . . He was like, ‘Can you please give me a note? What do you think I should do?’ It was such a sweet thing to kind of let me in.” It was little surprise to Cianfrance to see his two co-stars falling in love. “It wasn’t hard for me to see that the chemistry could be there, just knowing them as individuals,” he says. “What I saw was two great people who were so supportive of each other, who were really picking each other up, and pushing each other. . . . They were an undeniably good match and they pushed each other. . . . Michael and Alicia, they were like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. They were going to make one another better. And they were better together.” The real feelings invariably intensified the fictional romance. Even Fassbender, who’s abjectly reluctant to speak about his personal relationships, admits, “These things of course sort of spill through to what you’re doing.”

What with all the success, and the highly visible romance, Vikander has found herself the focus of public curiosity. She’s well aware that the public likes to build female stars up, only to take them down a few notches (Gwyneth Paltrow, Anne Hathaway, Jennifer Lawrence), and of the cruel power of tabloids and social media. “The gossip press is so big out here,” says Vikander, a few days later in Los Angeles, by phone. “There’s an urge to find that one thing that you say that can make a headline. It’s tough because I don’t want to be reserved, or holding back, or to not be myself.” It seems she’s speaking from personal experience, so I ask if there have been any stories out there in the press that she regrets. She’s about to answer when, as if on cue, a junior publicist who has been listening in loudly interrupts. “Can we skip the question and wrap it up real quick?” Taken aback, Vikander laughs uncomfortably. For a moment, one wonders whether she isn’t ready to have someone else be the Luckiest Girl Alive.