VICKY KRIEPS HAS A SECRET

Photography CHANTAL ANDERSON | Styling JONATHAN HUGUET

Story ANGELINE RODRIGUEZ

All looks CHANEL by VIRGINIE VIARD

VICKY KRIEPS is playing two roles at once. “I live this double life; sometimes I feel like I'm a double agent. One life really has nothing to do with the other life but both are very real to me because the way I do my job feels very personal—it feels like a love affair.”

We speak over Zoom as she awaits food delivery to her Berlin apartment; she’s just put on a cartoon for her son, Jan-Noah. The Luxembourgish actress is no stranger to navigating between disparate roles—since her breakout as the enigmatic muse of 2017’s Phantom Thread, Vicky Krieps has played nurses, filmmakers, and empresses, and just wrapped filming on her turn as a hard-riding cowgirl in Viggo Mortensen’s upcoming western, The Dead Don’t Hurt. She slips in and out of her role as mother just as easily, though as she ties a red scarf beneath her hastily gathered hair, she tells me finding that balance took some practice.

“I live this double life; sometimes I feel like I'm a double agent. One life really has nothing to do with the other life but both are very real to me because the way I do my job feels very personal—it feels like a love affair.”

“It was after Phantom Thread and realizing how much it takes to do this kind of work—this movie and working with Daniel and seeing what it takes from him and from everybody. Am I the artist or am I the mother or am I the lover or—who am I, really?” Trying to keep the personae of her work and life neatly categorized was impossible — so she stopped.“I just let go of my need to understand what I am doing.  Since then, it doesn't fuck with my mind at all. It can just flow in and out of one another. I can be all these people at once. They're all me.”

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Where others compartmentalize, Krieps embraces the tension of opposites. A rebel by nature (or perhaps by blood—her grandfather survived Dachau and went on to abolish the death penalty in Luxembourg), Krieps spent her bohemian youth climbing trees and making headlines for her iconoclastic high school graduation speech. “My mother taught me to be free, to love my body, and to never let myself be crushed by clothes,” she says, a distinct contrast to the constricted and quieted women she’s played onscreen. Both Phantom Thread’s Alma and Corsage’s Empress Elisabeth of Austria find themselves literally or figuratively hemmed in by the strictures of their times, and in particular the control exerted by their exacting husbands. Far from going method, Krieps found outlets on set for her native insubordination, whether it was ad-libbing retorts or disappearing to go for a hike in period-accurate corsetry. “I can't hold still, I climb on every tree. I love running away from people.”

The contrast animates her performances with a simmering, subtle defiance that arises naturally from her combination of extremes. “I’m looking for the superimposition between me and something else. I always look for this, for the tension between two things. If I, the Vicky of today, go into the past—I have a tension. Looking into the past, to me, makes it easier to understand the present.” History has remained an abiding interest of hers since childhood, when she tromped around old castles and snuck over to the neighbors’ to watch Romy Schneider’s Sissi films, the conservative predecessor to her much more revisionist take on the empress in Corsage (2022). “Throughout history women are never tired. They just go on. Femininity has a lot to do with the capacity to go inside, because if you can’t go anywhere, you go inside. It is a rebellion but it is a quiet rebellion.”

Such paradoxes come easily to Krieps, who no sooner defines femininity than she questions the boundaries of gender roles themselves. “I think we're starting to realize that we don't have to understand what and who we are—if we are a man, if we are a woman; if we are the mother or if once you are the mother you aren't the lover anymore. We are starting to understand that's something we made up. We invented it in the first place.”

Regardless, she prefers to work with women, though she grants that may not be the fault of men so much as how they are socialized.

The key difference, she says, is the noise. “It’s more quiet [with women]. If you had been on the set of Corsage, no one was screaming.” Having just come from work on the upcoming French blockbuster The Three Musketeers, she admits the sound and fury of typical big budget productions isn’t how she works best. “That was hard for me. I realized then that I need silence. It’s about listening to people—not only is acting about listening, making movies is about listening.” The idea of quiet rebellion can seem paradoxical for someone as vocal as Krieps, but informs not just the women Krieps plays but her entire ethos of film-making. By making space for silence, she makes a radical statement in the bluster of Hollywood.  

One might naturally wonder if taking a more active role in the movie-making process is what’s next for Krieps. “I am an actor, yes, but I'm actually interested in film and I'm interested in the art of filmmaking,” she says, and has played the role of filmmaker before both fictionally in Bergman Island (2021) and her real-life involvement in the creation of Corsage. But Krieps has never been one to make the predictable move. “There's something now about directing, it's almost too obvious. Because that's what everyone thinks I'll do. But deep inside of me—I can't let go of this belief that they cannot tell me what to do.”

For now, she’s quietly rebelling by leaning into the other half of the double agent life and taking some much-needed time at home with her family. “I think my kids have probably saved me from becoming an asshole. To know that someone loves you unconditionally and that you love someone unconditionally. You create your own belief system. It's the actual secret to everything.”