USA TODAY International Edition
Vicky Krieps pulls ‘Phantom Thread’ together well
Daniel Day-Lewis’ co-star thought she auditioned for a student film.
In Phantom Thread, newcomer Vicky Krieps manages a Herculean feat: upstaging one of the greatest actors alive.
“As Phantom Thread flits between complicated character piece and unusually funny romantic comedy, the movie becomes much more about Krieps’ Alma. The Luxembourgian actress holds her own with Daniel Day-Lewis and often is the best part of the movie,” USA TODAY’s Brian Truitt raves. Others call her the ’50s drama’s “standout,” giving a “starmaking turn” as the bashful waitress who blossoms into a formidable fashion model and muse for stringent designer Reynolds Woodcock (Day-Lewis).
But as Krieps, 34, tells it, she initially had no idea she was auditioning for the latest film from Paul Thomas Anderson
(There Will Be Blood). The actress received a casting notice last year and immediately taped an audition, without regard to who or what exactly it was for. A few days later, her agent called and said Anderson wanted to meet.
“She could tell that I was a little too cool, because I said, ‘Yeah, give him my number,’ ” Krieps says. “And she said, ‘Vicky, do you know who we’re talking about?’ And that’s when I realized: ‘No, I didn’t even read the email. Was there a name?’ For some reason, I had thought it was an independent or student film.”
Phantom marks the first major English-language role for Krieps, who prefers trousers over dresses and never fashioned herself a film star growing up.
“I didn’t have this dream to become an actress, because I come from Luxembourg,” Krieps says. “If you come from a small place, it’s a big thing to imagine yourself being a movie actor.”
Unsure of her career path after high school, she traveled around Mozambique and worked in a township in South Africa — eventually choosing to pursue her artistic ambitions by enrolling at Zurich University of the Arts. Now living in Berlin, she has spent most of the past decade acting in French and German movies but has no designs to move to Los Angeles to capitalize on her stateside breakthrough.
“I go where the work calls me,” Krieps says. “If I go far away, I go far away. But I won’t try and make my career in a certain way.”
From the moment she met Anderson, the director says, “it was pretty clear we had a great actress on our hands that nobody had found before for this kind of part,” Anderson says. “Her ability to go toe-to-toe (with Day-Lewis) was one thing, but her ability to beat him — and make it believable to an audience — is just something you feel.”
At first content to be Reynolds’ armpiece, Alma grows weary of being brushed aside and deviously levels the playing field in the film’s comically twisted second half. Krieps compares the characters’ push and pull to a dance between two lovers as they learn to understand each other in their own way.
“People do strange things behind closed doors, and couples have their own game: Sometimes it’s sexual, or sometimes it’s just supporting each other,” Krieps says. Raveled up in couture clothing and high society, Reynolds becomes “this strange person with all his instructions and rules, but it’s not actually him: It’s him trying to deal with the world he’s in. (Alma) is just trying to get him out and close to her, so they can share a real moment and relationship.”