Vicky Krieps Wants You to Wake Up

Vicky Krieps is showing me photos on her phone from her time shooting Corsage, Austria’s Oscar entry, when she pauses on a selfie. “This is when I climbed on a tree,” she says. During breaks from playing the 19th-century Empress Elisabeth of Austria, otherwise known as Sisi, she would zip up a red onesie over her corset and climb a tree. I ask how she was even able to do that in the restrictive garment. “If you have a big need, you get everything done,” she says. “I just needed to.” 

The corset-wearing tree climbing is true to the anarchic spirit of both the acclaimed movie directed by Marie Kreutzer and Krieps herself. After her breakout role in 2017’s Phantom Thread, the Luxembourgish actress could have easily followed the prescribed path of a nascent US star, but Krieps is a rebel at heart who sees cinema as a lifeline for herself and her audience. “Maybe that’s my mission in life,” she considers during our conversation. “I feel that we are asleep in this construction of society and, whenever I can, I try to wake someone up.” 

Corsage is a revisionist take on Sisi, who held the crown between 1854 and her assassination, in 1898. It conveys the empress’s vanity—her extremely long hair and extremely small waist—as well as her sadness, filtering it through a modern perspective and revealing a woman both submitting to and subverting beauty standards. Krieps captures Sisi’s malaise, but also her character’s whimsy and anger. And it’s a deeply personal work too: Krieps brought the idea to Kreutzer, and her fascination with Sisi extends back to her own adolescence. 

On a frigid December day, Krieps and I meet at Balthazar in Covent Garden, which is loud with patrons and alight with Christmas decorations at 10:45 a.m. Over almost comically large bowls of café au lait like Krieps’s grandmother would drink, it’s an appropriate location to discuss Sisi, still an icon in Europe. Krieps’s conservative neighbors growing up used to watch Romy Schneider’s trilogy films about the empress every Christmas. “I got familiar with her as a girl through them, but more like, ‘Oh, this is a beautiful princess with a beautiful dress,’” she says. 

Krieps had a “beautiful, hippie childhood” where she was “always naked in the garden.” Her mother taught her how to climb trees—trees are a recurring theme throughout our conversation—and that she didn’t need to wear makeup. And then, she entered the rest of the world, where she was told to conform or no one would go to the movie theater with her. At 14, her heart broke while reading a biography of Sisi by Brigitte Hamann, a reminder of her own rude awakening when she reached adolescence. “It’s the cruelty of the system, forcing you into something,” she says now. 

To prepare to play Sisi, Krieps put her body through tests her character endured. She went ice swimming in the Danube every morning for two months, later pulling out a picture of her freezing toes in a bathtub to show me. She learned how to ride sidesaddle and how to fence. She worked with a movement coach to find a body language for Sisi. But she also tapped into generations of women in her own family—her mother, the rebel, and her more traditional grandmother. “I had to go make peace with my grandmother and understand why these women were behaving, why these women were playing the game,” she says. “To then allow myself to break it, lovingly.” 

On set, Krieps, typically an “overly social person,” isolated herself from the rest of the cast and crew to embody Sisi’s status. But she kept her mischievous impulses with her too. Every morning before filming, she would close her eyes and imagine the empress on her right and Romy Schneider on her left. “I said, ‘Now I take you to the playground,’” she says. “I feel that these two women, like so many other women, were never allowed to just play, just be silly and be stupid and be wrong and make mistakes and be ugly.”