‘I REALLY BELIEVE IF I’M HERE ON THIS PLANET, I MIGHT AS WELL TRY AND CONTRIBUTE TO SOMETHING THAT IS ALIVE.’
Ever since going toe to toe with Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread, Vicky Krieps has emerged as one of Europe’s most distinguished actors. Now, as she saddles up for Viggo Mortensen’s elegiac western The Dead Don’t Hurt, the outspoken Luxembourg-born star tells Total Film just why she won’t compromise her ideals for anything…
As Vicky Krieps pops up on video chat, sporting a red jumper and a big smile, Total Film’s eye immediately does a recce around the Berlin-based living room that she shares with her partner and two children. Behind her, a heaving bookshelf, including a copy of Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems. It’s unsurprising to find this actor so well read; ever since she came to international attention in Paul Thomas Anderson’s finely stitched 2017 drama Phantom Thread, opposite Daniel Day-Lewis, her choices have been those of someone who cares about good writing, about quality cinema.
It’s the end of April, just over a year from when TF last met Krieps at the Berlin Film Festival, when she was premiering the German film Journey into the Desert, playing the poet Ingeborg Bachmann. Then, in interview, she was playful, open, outspoken and painfully honest. ‘Maybe one day I will have to pay for this,’ she said, wryly, but it’s clear that Krieps can’t function any other way. She simply can’t buy into Hollywood BS. And when she’s so in demand by some of world cinema’s finest directors, why should she?
This June sees her deliver another nuanced performance in The Dead Don’t Hurt, the second feature directed by actor Viggo Mortensen. Set in 1860s Nevada, he plays Danish immigrant carpenter Holger Olsen, who falls for Krieps’ Vivienne Le Coudy, an independently minded woman who has recently separated from her boorish husband. Meditative and Malick-like in its compositions, it’s also a tender look at frontier living – until that is, Holger disappears to fight in the Civil War. A superior western, it’s exactly what you might hope for from actors like Krieps and Mortensen.
Seeing Krieps on American soil is something of a surprise, being an actor so intimately associated with Europe. Born in Hesperange, Luxembourg, Krieps’ childhood was free-spirited. ‘My mum was a feminist, hippy kind of woman,’ she explains. ‘I was always barefoot and I always had trousers and I always had short hair.’ Her father, who studied politics and history, managed a film-distribution company, although he was more interested in the business than the art of cinema.
In her early years, she trained at the Conservatoire de Luxembourg and later Zurich’s University of the Arts, but it was a trip to South Africa, where she worked in a primary school, that cement
