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Alicia Vikander is in an unusual position this awards season.

At the 2016 Golden Globes, she'll arrive double-nominated, for best actress in The Danish Girl (in theaters nationwide Christmas Day) and again for her supporting role in spring's sci-fi critical favorite Ex Machina, in which she plays a robot whose artificial intelligence allows her to break away from the man who created her.

Those are just two of the five films that Vikander has appeared in this year, which spanned Guy Ritchie's The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and chef drama Burnt to the World War I coming-of-age story Testament of Youth. Which means the Jessica Chastain comparisons have been rolling in for a while.

"I've heard it a few times," says Vikander, 27, who also has recently been nominated for Screen Actors Guild and Critics' Choice awards. (Chastain's big debut year was 2011, when she had five films out within 12 months.) But there's a big difference at play, she cautions. "I'm a Swedish actress, and for me it's just been such a huge thing that I got a chance to do English-speaking films."

She remembers her first Golden Globes three years ago, when her Danish film A Royal Affair was nominated in the foreign film category. "I was running around with my Danish director Nikolaj Arcel, and I was just pointing, oh, my God! For me, it was just a dream. I didn't really have a reference that you could go away and work abroad."

Vikander's first big American role was in Joe Wright's Anna Karenina, but it's The Danish Girl, co-starring Eddie Redmayne, that's turning her into one of the go-to young actresses in Hollywood.She plays Gerda Wegener, a portrait artist in the 1920s who stands resolutely by her husband, Einar (Redmayne), a landscape painter, after he confesses that he believes he was born in the wrong gender and begins to dress as a woman they call Lili.

Despite her confusion and loss, Gerda refuses to leave Lili, who undergoes one of the earliest attempts at gender confirmation surgery. Vikander calls Gerda a woman "ahead of her time. Above anything, I was amazed by what a loving person she is. She can dare to have this unconditional love that she has for Lili."

Vikander's vibrant, empathetic performance is so striking that it has incited debate over whether she should be regarded as a supporting or lead actress for Oscar consideration.

"She's terrific," says Danish Girl screenwriter Lucinda Coxon. "It's so great to watch a young female character on film who's not asking for your approval, who has enormous charm and is incredibly sympathetic and winning, but is entirely her own person. And she's not a victim. There are gains and losses for her and you mourn the losses with her."

Those who work with Vikander regularly cite her dedication and precision. The daughter of a theater actress mother and psychiatrist father, she spent years studying ballet, "so she's got this rigorous side to her," says director Tom Hooper, noting the same rigor she's applied to becoming fluent in English.

Hooper, who had hoped to cast a Danish actress for the role, recalls the day Vikander turned up for casting. "She was so moving that I had tears in my eyes at the end of the first take. And Eddie turned to me and goes, 'Well, there's no great surprise about who you're going to cast now, Hooper.' "

Next, Vikander will star in The Light Between Oceans with beau Michael Fassbender, and the new Bourne film opposite Matt Damon. On the red carpet, she's an effortlessly stylish figure, adored by big fashion houses (she's the face of Louis Vuitton) and fashion bibles (Vikander is Vogue's January cover girl, dubbed "Hollywood's Swede Heart").

But the actress is keeping the perks of her newfound fame (which included a tricked-out private plane she shared with Redmayne from London the night prior) in perspective.

"We were taking a lot of photos and called our mums," Vikander says with a smile. "You need to be fine with knowing that it all can go away."

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