Vicky Krieps

Paul Thomas Anderson discovered Vicky Krieps in a small German film called Das Zimmermädchen Lynn. She watched her clean rooms, stay silent and hold close-ups without blinking. Shortly after, he sent her an email inviting her to London for an audition.

She didn't even know who that Californian director was.

Krieps was born in Luxembourg in 1983, the daughter of a cultural distributor and granddaughter of Robert Krieps, a member of the resistance against the Nazi occupation and Minister of Justice after the war. She grew up in a constant linguistic crossroads where French, German and Luxembourgish coexisted daily. She studied acting at the Zurich University of the Arts and made her European film debut with a string of supporting roles that barely paid the bills. She appeared in Hanna in 2011 and in A Most Wanted Man in 2014, always on the margins of the frame and with directors who barely gave her two lines in a row.

Filming The Invisible Thread in 2017 disrupted that routine without warning. The British press expected Daniel Day-Lewis to devour a nearly unknown actress in his official farewell to the screen. Instead of shrinking, Krieps held her ground with unsettling calm. Her Alma Elson didn't compete through volume but through screen presence, debunking the acting method myth with a simple piece of toast spread with butter.

The American industry tried to pigeonhole her into period roles right away.

She chose to return to Europe.

Controlling the frame and other people's bodies

She turned down Hollywood franchise deals to work with auteur directors who would let her take risks without studio oversight. In 2021 she starred in Bergman Island under Mia Hansen-Løve and took a purely playful role in Old by M. Night Shyamalan. That same year she carried the dramatic weight of Hold Me Tight, directed by Mathieu Amalric, playing a mother who abandons her family amid fragmented memories.

Her definitive breakthrough as an author came when she herself proposed filming about Empress Elisabeth of Bavaria.

In The Rebel Empress (2022) she not only took the lead role but also served as executive producer after convincing Marie Kreutzer to write the screenplay. Her take on Sissi shattered the romantic clichés surrounding Romy Schneider: Krieps played a forty-year-old monarch who smoked in public, flipped off the court and suffocated under her corset. That performance earned her the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival in the Un Certain Regard section, as well as the European Film Academy award.

But the film's critical success was overshadowed months later. Co-star Florian Teichtmeister was convicted of possessing child pornography, and the film's international distribution campaign collapsed overnight.

Fierce Independence and Dusty Westerns

Krieps never built her filmography around diplomatic comfort. In 2023 she donned the queen's costume in the French blockbuster The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan and stepped into the shoes of poet Ingeborg Bachmann for Margarethe von Trotta. In 2024 she accepted Viggo Mortensen's call to co-star and co-produce The Dead Don't Hurt, a western shot in the Mexican deserts where she played Vivienne Le Coudy.

Mortensen adapted parts of the script specifically to accommodate her real accent and her unhurried rhythm in front of the camera.

In 2025 she joined the ensemble cast of Paterson directed by Jim Jarmusch, sharing scenes with Cate Blanchett and Adam Driver. That same year she premiered the courtroom drama Re-Creation alongside Colm Meaney, co-directed by Jim Sheridan, and adapted French writer Constance Debré for the feature Love Me Tender.

She lives in Berlin, has no permanent publicist in Los Angeles and makes an average of three independent projects a year, with budgets that rarely exceed five million euros.