My guest today is actress Vicky Krieps. To me, Krieps is this generation’s answer to Ingrid Bergman, a European movie star of otherworldly beauty, radiant and ethereal but also earthy and grounded, with remarkable life energy and depth.
She shot to fame in 2017, receiving rave reviews playing Alma, the latest muse of Daniel Day-Lewis’ chilly fashion designer, in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread.
In the years since, she has assembled a body of work that mixes more commercial projects like M. Night Shyamalan’s Old and the forthcoming Oceans’s Eleven prequel with standout European dramas like Mia Hansen-Løve’s Bergman Island and Matheiu Amalric’s Hold Me Tight, the crowdpleasing period biopic Corsage and U.S. indies such as Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother.
She can currently be seen in the latest season of Ryan Murphy’s true-crime show Monster – playing the dual roles of Lizzie Borden’s housemaid Bridget "Maggie" Sullivan and the Bloody Countess, Elizabeth Báthory.
Krieps is a dream first guest for this new season, as she is a deep thinker, a deep feeler, a person with a unique perspective on the seen and unseen worlds. I did a Three Great Things piece with her at Talkhouse a few years ago when Hold Me Tight came out, and she subsequently wrote an essay about her special relationship with nature timed to the release of the ghostly New Zealand drama Went Up the Hill.
Talking to Vicky Krieps feels like opening a door into wonder, and my hope for this episode was that we would dive deeper into the very particular way she sees life. I was not disappointed, as we touched on such topics as … the restorative value of time in the wilds with her guitar, what her shoes say about her, how she created her own version of Jesus as a child, her dream in which she and Johnny Flynn removed their heads, how a banana split changed the course of her life, and much, much more.
Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is now on Netflix, and you should use it as a starting point to go discover more of her excellent work that’s out there to stream.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and our new theme music is “Partly Cloudy Days” by Oscar Louis.
As a quick heads up: Oren Lefkowitz, the musical wizard behind Oscar Louis, has an amazing new project called Nowhere Else to Be, so go check it out stat!
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We have a bumper season coming up on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, and next week my guest is actor and comedian Jaboukie Young-White ...
