She does not hide that, on the first day of filming, there were tears. “Acting always starts with being afraid of being an impostor”, says Vicky Krieps. She had certainly wanted this role of Elisabeth of Austria in Bodice, Marie Kreutzer’s film, in theaters on December 14, which she went so far as to co-produce. But when it came time to jump into action, the same questions came up. “Who am I to play the leading role? To embody someone who existed? And, in addition, an empress, already played by Romy Schneider? Then I dried my tears and pretended. » She studied Hungarian, rode a horse, tried her hand at fencing, learned, with the help of her coach, choreographer Jane Gibson, to move in space with her waist strapped in a corset.
“Between takes, I could hear the other laughs in the dressing rooms and I had to force myself to stay away. » Vicky Krieps
Costumed, jeweled and haughty like Romy Schneider’s Sissi in Ernst Marischka’s trilogy (1955, 1956, 1957), Vicky Krieps’ Sissi shows up at 40, declining and brutal, suffocated by a world of conventions, craving chills. “I had to be introverted, unfriendly”, traits that those close to him do not know about him. She therefore asked the other actors, in particular those who play servants, to let her isolate herself. “Between takes, I could hear the other laughs in the dressing rooms and I had to force myself to stay away. But it was the only way that, once on set, it seemed natural that I was served, dressed, feared. »
Fill the frame and fade away
As if a role had to affect life… In 2017, on the set of Phantom Thread, the poisonous film by Paul Thomas Anderson which revealed the talent of Vicky Krieps to the whole world, the intransigent Daniel Day-Lewis had refused that they meet before the shooting. So that the magic of the first look between their characters, a high-flying couturier à la Cristóbal Balenciaga and a waitress, in 1950s London, can be intact. In the blink of an eye, faced with his gentlemanly smile, his diaphanous complexion had flushed…
When the film was released, the cinema community was unanimous: who was this almost 35-year-old actress, whose slender silhouette only Luxembourgers and Germans had sometimes seen, who was able to stand up to the Day-Lewis monster? They didn’t know that, for a long time, Vicky Krieps – who is today one of the most desired actresses in world cinema, capable of acting in English, German and French – rarely passed the casting stage. And longed to finally get a major role. When she got to play a secondary character, she was paradoxically criticized for being “too special” to parasitize the leading roles…
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