Vicky Krieps

Vicky Krieps was born on October 4, 1983, in Luxembourg — a detail that matters more than it might seem, because she came up outside the usual pipelines of London drama schools or Los Angeles casting circuits, and that outsider formation shows in how she works. She studied at the Zurich University of the Arts and built her early career across German and European productions, accumulating a body of work in television and smaller films before English-language audiences had any real sense of who she was. That changed decisively in 2017.

The film was Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, and Krieps played Alma, a waitress who becomes the muse — and then something far more complicated — to Daniel Day-Lewis's obsessive couturier Reynolds Woodcock. What's striking is how thoroughly she holds her own against a performer of Day-Lewis's magnitude, and not by matching his intensity but by doing something quieter and stranger: she lets Alma's inner life accumulate slowly, scene by scene, until the film's final act reframes everything you thought you'd watched. That performance earned her the Best Performance prize at Cannes in 2018 (under the Un Certain Regard section, for a separate project) and a BAFTA Rising Star nomination, but the Phantom Thread role remains the single piece of work that established her as someone worth paying close attention to. Hard to say if any role since has been quite as perfectly matched to what she does.

She doesn't gravitate toward obvious prestige material or franchise work. The recurring thread — if there is one — is characters who are being observed, controlled, or defined by someone else, and who push back against that in ways that aren't always legible as resistance. She worked with director Mia Hansen-Løve on Bergman Island (2021), playing a filmmaker navigating her own creative identity while literally surrounded by the ghost of another artist's legacy. That film asked a lot of its lead in terms of sustained interiority, and Krieps delivered it without the kind of actorly signposting that would have made it easier. She also appeared in Corsage (2022), directed by Marie Kreutzer, playing Empress Elisabeth of Austria — a role that won her Best Performance at Cannes that year, in the Un Certain Regard section, confirming that European festival circuit as a natural home for the kind of work she gravitates toward.

Recent projects suggest she's continuing to operate across a range of registers and production scales. Hot Milk (2025), directed by Rebecca Lenkiewicz and adapted from Deborah Levy's novel, cast Krieps in what is a psychologically layered story about bodies, mothers, and the weight of unspoken need — the kind of material she's clearly drawn to. And Father Mother Sister Brother: A Family Reunion Drama (2026) places her in an ensemble context, though the specifics of her role within that project are still emerging. Two very different tonal registers. That range is the point.

The thing nobody mentions often enough about Krieps is that she's built this career almost entirely on European and independent productions, with only occasional crossovers into wider commercial release — and she's done it without a publicist-managed persona or the usual awards-campaign apparatus working on her behalf. She's now in her early forties, at a point in a career where the roles available to women in mainstream cinema often narrow; the evidence from Hot Milk and the upcoming ensemble work suggests she's not particularly interested in that narrowing, and that the filmmakers she's drawn to aren't either.