Her dream run

Arthouse star Vicky Krieps came to New Zealand to make a movie and ended up recording an album as well.

- BY RUSSELL BAILLIE

Vicky Krieps is quite driven. Today, she's in the back of a London cab as it rumbles down the Kingsland High St. As she talks animatedly, her iPad camera frames her face against a sunny background of double-decker buses and leafy, busy streets. It's 7.30am on a Friday there and Krieps, rosy-cheeked, sporting a single feather earring and an expensive designer bouclé baseball cap, is off to work on a project that she can't yet discuss.

But the trilingual 41-year-old actress, who, since she went head-to-head with Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson's 2017 couturier drama The Phantom Thread, has become quite a star. And she doesn't lack for movies she can talk about. She's now an in-demand international arthouse name, a kind of EU answer to a Tilda Swinton or a Cate Blanchett. Though one who purposefully turned her back on Hollywood after the hype and the awards campaigning that followed her breakthrough role got too much.

"I survived it by running away," she says later in the Zoom call with the Listener.

"I still don't know if it was the right thing to do, or the wrong thing to do, and I really don't care. I don't think it's about doing things right, but it was my natural reaction. I felt so repulsed from this, whatever is the Hollywood system, and especially the so-called press tour. To me, it just felt like the devil hiding in some nice clothes. I had this intuitive feeling of, 'I have to stay away from this because it's dangerous... I just continued doing what I did before, which is independent movies that have small budgets, and so I'm free." She rounds off her thoughts with a quote about creative independence from legendary New York Times fashion photographer Bill Cunningham: "You just don't take their money, and they won't tell you what to do."