Phantom Thread co-star on #MeToo's America

Co-starring alongside Daniel Day-Lewis in his last ever role, Krieps is also on her way to the Academy Awards, where her movie Phantom Thread has been nominated for best picture.

But the 34-year-old actress seems relaxed, confident, something she tried to master during her time shooting alongside Day-Lewis.

“I think I wasn’t intimidated because I try not to think too much about people beforehand,” she said.

“I meet a person as the person, I try to not give away who they are or who they’re supposed to be.”

Whether they are “famous or not famous, powerful or not powerful, a king or a slave”, Krieps says she doesn’t care.

And it’s perhaps that lightness of being which makes her character Alma so hypnotising and hard to decipher – a true match for her on-screen partner on his last hurrah.

“I spent all my time trying to forget what I knew about him and forget about what it might mean to work with him and I even tried to forget that I was an actress so that I would be completely neutral, open and fair,” she said.

“To meet his character, whoever he was going to be.”

In the movie, Day-Lewis plays couturier Reynolds Woodcock, a spoiled bachelor filled with demands and charisma, who falls in love with a waitress at a cafe.

And it was in that first scene, when the two characters first meet each other, that Krieps first spoke to Day-Lewis – in true method-acting style.

“I didn’t think about this too much and I wasn’t really intimidated but then all these people were coming to me saying: ‘Oh you’re going to make a movie with Daniel Day-Lewis. He’s a method actor, you know what that means…’ – so I started to become scared because of what they were saying,” she confided.

But she has the advantage of not knowing it would be his last film.

“No one knew. He said it in the summer and it was a surprise to everyone,” she said.

“Maybe I will look at the movie differently in a few years’ time. I think now it is too close, I don’t.”

But one artist’s last stand is another’s inception, and Krieps has swiftly moved from small European productions to the heart of Hollywood awards.

“It’s not something I was longing for at all. I feel very comfortable in Europe,” she said.

“I’m very proudly European. I love that we have stories to tell of a place where we come from and we can relate to.

“I love how complicated we are. We are complicated because of what we’ve had and lived… this whole awards things… I don’t know…”

But being a proud European actress these days also comes with a baggage.

Over the last few months, veteran French stars like Catherine Deneuve and Brigitte Bardot have criticised Hollywood’s #MeToo movement, drawing a line in the sand between Europe and America.

I asked Krieps if she found there was a clear distinction.

“Obviously,” she responded promptly.

“The American society is completely numb. They are suffocating under capitalism to a point where they don’t really feel it anymore.

“How can you have a discussion on something when you don’t feel it, you know? You need to feel, and then speak out.

“In this case, all these women speak out because they have very strong feelings, very concrete… But that’s just natural, that’s how it should be.

“I think that for them it’s new, but it’s not new.”

Like her continentals before her, Krieps seems to stand out from the Hollywood commons.

Very much her own woman, she challenges more common views of the world, refusing to accept border, race or gender as a changeling factor – something which she says she shared with her director.

“I don’t believe in borders, I find them boring. And I don’t see any difference between any person,” she said.

“Not between men and women or between black and white. I just don’t see it, and I don’t know what the whole thing is about.

“Paul Thomas Anderson is someone who is also like this,” she adds.

“He might be from California, but then his mind is just everywhere and anywhere.

“He reads all these books and he watches all these films and his heart is open and his spirit is open. I find that much more interesting.”

:: Phantom Thread opens in UK cinemas 2 February