The Click That Made Vicky Krieps a Star

While making short movies with her childhood friends, European actress Vicky Krieps fell in love with the camera. “I remember feeling like the camera was giving off some energy that only I could feel. It was some strange creature—half machine and half living eye,” she recalls. “I was fascinated by it.” She went on to study at Zurich University of the Arts and began working steadily in independent films.

Director Paul Thomas Anderson discovered one of those films, The Chambermaid, on iTunes. “I couldn’t believe anyone saw it—it was on iTunes for one week,” Krieps says. “But he clicked on it!” Anderson went on to cast her as the female lead in Phantom Thread, a movie he wrote and directed, which opens on Christmas Day. She gives a tour de force performance as Alma, a waitress in 1950s England who becomes the muse and eventual lover of high-end dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock, played by Daniel Day-Lewis.

“I met him the first day of shooting because he decided he wanted us not to rehearse and to just shoot the first scene,” Krieps says, recalling her first encounter with the three-time Oscar-winning actor. “It was definitely intimidating.” The film also stars veteran English actress Lesley Manville as Cyril, Woodcock’s sister.

Krieps, whose character upends Woodcock’s well-ordered life, says love is the ultimate disrupter. “Love cannot be defined, caught, cast in stone, or archived,” she says. “It’s something we have no control over. Love is completely analog. Love can never be digital.”

Thankfully for Krieps, today’s films are digital. And with the click of a director’s finger, a star can be born.

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