Alicia Vikander is ideal in 'Ex Machina'

Alicia Vikander wanted to play the ideal robot woman so badly that for a self-made audition, the Swedish actress pulled her hair back, slathered half a bottle of sunscreen on her face, added some weirdly colored eyeliner and channeled her inner machine.

It wasn't until writer/director Alex Garland cast her to play Ava in his sci-fi movie Ex Machina (in theaters Friday) that she could really start perfecting her character's perfection. No sunblock required.

"You had the chance to be very artistic and innovative trying to create this thing you really didn't have any reference to at the beginning," says Vikander, 26, who was previously in Anna Karenina and stars next in The Danish Girl (Nov. 27).

In Ex Machina, an enigmatic tech CEO (Oscar Isaac) recruits a young programmer (Domhnall Gleeson) to spend a week at his reclusive estate in order to determine if Ava, artificial intelligence in an android body, is so human in personality as to be indistinguishable from a real woman.

The character is a balance of many things, Garland says. He didn't want a fake-looking robot like C-3PO from Star Wars but rather something elegant and refined, representative of our "post-Apple world," says the director. "When you look at early computers, they look sort of absurd in comparison to where they are now."

Clad in a silver mesh bodysuit with her inner workings added via special effects, Vikander felt Ava looked like a piece of art in "the way the machinery works and moves," she says. "Even though it weirdly comes down to mesh, wires and iron, when it all comes together, it looks very beautiful."

Vikander drew upon her dance training from childhood to make her movements a little too perfect.

"The stillness of how she moves and sits down and doesn't blink, those kinds of things made her feel more robotic, because humans are more inconsistent and have more flaws," the actress says. "She's almost aimed for a greater human."

Adds Garland: "When you or I move, we don't act in a perfect way — we slouch or trip up as we walk across the room."

Murray Shanahan, a robotics professor at Imperial College London and an AI consultant on the film, was impressed that Vikander avoided the "uncanny valley," robotics-speak for something that is a creepy medium between realistic and not so much.

"You're convinced there's someone at home there," says Shanahan.

Garland would often tell Vikander that he liked "doe-eyed" Ava, but the traits she exhibits throughout the movie aren't always so innocent.

"That's what I was aiming for," Vikander says. "All the offbeats came from something that you hopefully would buy as a girl."