The Love Me Tender star talks about acting, motherhood and the freedom of refusing to become the person society expects her to be.
The first time I met Vicky Krieps was at a dinner in Locarno, where we ended up discussing how accepting the possibility of failure can actually be liberating. When we met again to talk about her new film, Love Me Tender, I reminded her of that conversation.
The film follows Clémence, a mother who comes out as a lesbian and subsequently finds herself fighting to keep custody of her child. For Krieps, the story is closely connected to the idea that losing something can sometimes be the beginning of freedom.
“Exactly,” she says. “There is probably nothing more frightening than stepping out into the world and saying, ‘OK, this is who I am.’ Because you know you’re leaving the structures society has given you to live in.”
“We’re told who we’re supposed to be, where we’re born and where we belong. And then, when you step outside those structures and say, ‘No, I actually don’t like this, and maybe I don’t even like my family,’ you start becoming who you really are.”
It is a sentiment that seems entirely consistent with the young Krieps, who once walked out of an English class while her teacher was reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. She wanted to make sure they were not, in fact, living in the dystopian world described by Orwell.
“It’s always very, very scary because you might fail,” she says. “But the truth is, with failure you cannot lose. You cannot fail at becoming yourself. It’s the same with acting. You cannot fail at acting because the failure becomes the moment. It’s scary, but once you’re in it, that’s all there is.”
A distinctly European talent
Krieps seems almost tailor-made for a new generation of European banknotes. Her mother is German, while her father was director of Luxembourg’s Ministry of Culture. She speaks German, Luxembourgish, French and English with ease.
Her international breakthrough came with Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread in 2017, where she went head-to-head with Daniel Day-Lewis and earned widespread acclaim. Yet Krieps has never seemed particularly interested in conventional ideas of prestige or star power.
Love Me Tender is based on an autofictional work by French writer Constance Debré. Asked about playing real people, Krieps takes aim at what she sees as one of the biggest traps in acting: imitation.
“I think there is only one great danger in acting: when we believe we know how to copy someone, and when we think that copying someone is the homework we have to do in order to be rewarded.”
She gives examples of actors proudly reproducing the voice or mannerisms of a historical figure, or carefully recreating the characteristics of someone with a disability.
“Then we say, ‘Oh, what a great actor.’ But actually, it’s just doing your homework.”
For Krieps, great acting happens somewhere between consciousness and instinct.
“It’s something that can only happen if you’re not in control.”
Or, as Buzz Lightyear puts it in Toy Story: it is not flying, but falling with style.
From Sissi to Clémence
Her experience during the promotion of Phantom Thread inspired Krieps to take on both the lead role and executive producer duties on Corsage (2022), a playful portrait of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, better known as Sissi.
The film presents a woman trapped by the expectations of fame and status, yet determined to live according to her own rules.
“When I play real people, I try not to think about them, and I think about them at the same time,” Krieps explains. “When I played Sissi or the writer Ingeborg Bachmann, I tried to close my eyes and connect with whatever my intuition was telling me.”
Her latest character, Clémence, is caught in a very different kind of struggle. After coming out to her husband, she is accused of corrupting their son and becomes embroiled in a lengthy custody battle.
Krieps can relate to some aspects of the character’s experience.
“I’m a mother myself. I have two children, and of course I didn’t go through what Clémence went through. But when you’re a woman and you choose artistic projects that don’t necessarily bring you money, people around you don’t understand.”
She recalls repeatedly being asked why she did not simply take a television role in Berlin.
“The series they were talking about was actually a really bad TV series. You would never ask a surgeon, ‘Why don’t you open a doctor’s office next to your child’s school so you can pick them up afterwards?’ They would never even think of asking that. But I’ve been asked this question so many times.”
Letting go
Playing a queer woman is not new territory for Krieps. She previously appeared in the film adaptation of Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk.
“I keep doing these movies. I can’t tell you why they come to me, but there’s something, I guess,” she says.
Even so, Love Me Tender required her to step into unfamiliar territory.
“I thought, ‘OK, now I need this scary moment of letting go. This is unknown territory.’ I have enormous respect for women who love women and for the different ways they express their sexuality.”
The challenge, she says, was to maintain that respect while also allowing herself to stop thinking about it.
“Just let go and go for it. It’s sexuality. It’s love. It’s sensuality. We all have it. We all have skin. We breathe. We feel. And then you just follow that.”
Director Anna Cazenave Cambet believes Clémence’s story fills a gap that still exists in cinema.
“There have been many stories about coming out, but you already see women over 30 disappearing from cinema. A queer woman wanting to live her life and be herself in her 40s and beyond had almost no references.”
Cambet says Krieps was able to capture both the character’s extraordinary strength and vulnerability.
“There is also a mystery around her. She doesn’t completely reveal herself in her roles, and I found that fascinating. I wanted to emphasise that by having her not speak her emotions. Her emotions are really translated through her body. I wanted access to that sensitivity, and I knew I could trust her.”
A two-year custody battle
In Love Me Tender, Clémence spends two years fighting for custody of her son. With every passing month, she knows she is missing another part of his childhood.
Alongside the emotional drama of the custody battle, the film is also a portrait of Clémence discovering herself more fully as a writer and as a person.
For Cambet, the geography of Paris plays an important role in that journey.
“The film is a kind of road trip through the city. Clémence moves around a lot, and as she goes on, she becomes more and more dispossessed, literally.”
Cambet lived in Paris’s Belleville district for 14 years and wanted the film to reflect the area’s diversity.
“It’s one of the most mixed areas of Paris. It’s more politically left-wing, more queer. Many of the strongholds of queer nightlife are there.”
The director also wanted to move away from the familiar cinematic image of Paris.
“I really wanted to get away from the more classical, American view of Paris. The 20th arrondissement has a very diverse population, more modern apartment blocks and less of the traditional Haussmann architecture. It’s an area I absolutely love.”
“Motherhood is a tool patriarchy uses against women”
Krieps recently appeared in Jim Jarmusch’s Father Mother Sister Brother (2025), alongside Charlotte Rampling as her mother and Cate Blanchett as her sister.
Both films challenge conventional ideas about motherhood.
“For some reason, we put the love between a mother and a child in a different room,” Krieps says. “It’s as if it doesn’t require real love or honest conversations. As if it only requires presence and cooking. That’s bullshit.”
She believes parents should be able to have a more equal relationship with their children.
“I think we can love our children on eye level. We should invite our children to see who we are and then let them have an opinion about that. You can say, ‘It’s OK if you don’t like me, but this is who I am.’”
Cambet has experienced a similar double standard.
At film festivals and press events, she says, she is often asked who looks after her children.
“No one ever asks my male counterparts about their childcare arrangements. They would never even think to.”
For Krieps, motherhood has long been one of the mechanisms through which patriarchy has constrained women.
“Women are seen as beings who can give life, as if that is the one big magical thing they do. But they can be all these other things too. Giving birth is only one part of them.”
She argues that patriarchy ultimately harms everyone.
“I think men are victims of patriarchy just as much as women. I don’t even think patriarchy was created for men. It was created for the machine, so the machine could run better and faster. It was a way of putting women in a box.”
Krieps refuses the box
Vicky Krieps, however, has no intention of being put in one.
Her next project will be a new version of Ocean’s Eleven, marking what she describes as her return to Hollywood.
“I guess this is my first time coming back to Hollywood, apart from Ed Gein: Monster, which also felt a little bit Hollywood. Then I’m doing a movie in the UK, although I have a very small part in it. And then I’m going back to small independent French movies.”
After her performance in Love Me Tender, it is easy to understand why her next move is worth watching. Alongside performers such as Renate Reinsve and Sandra Hüller, Krieps has established herself as one of the most compelling talents in European cinema.
And she remains determined to go wherever the work takes her — just not into a box.
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