Vicky Krieps says she made a deliberate choice after Phantom Thread changed her profile: she passed on the attention that followed and went back to Europe. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the 34-year-old actress said she did not lean into the moment Hollywood seemed to offer after her 2017 breakout, even though the film had put her firmly on the international map.
That choice is drawing fresh attention now because Krieps is back in a major production lane, shooting Bradley Cooper’s Ocean’s Eleven prequel in the South of France. For readers who remember her as the young muse opposite Daniel Day-Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, the interview offers a clear answer to a long-running question: what did she do when the industry started circling her?
Krieps said the path to the film itself was almost accidental. She recalled opening the email, scrolling straight to the PDF script and assuming the project came from a student who did not yet have a full script and wanted to write with an actress. Only later did she realize it was a Paul Thomas Anderson film. That gamble paid off in December 2017, when Phantom Thread premiered in New York and later picked up six Academy Award nominations.
But the visibility that followed did not turn her into a conventional Hollywood ascendant. Krieps said she did need a break after awards-season attention, and she said the decision was shaped in part by having two little children at the time. Motherhood, she said, sharpened her instincts. She has also said she had taken career pauses from very early on, long before the industry started treating her like a new arrival.
The friction in her story is the part many career narratives skip: Krieps was not pushed out of Hollywood’s orbit so much as she chose not to stay inside it. She described that period as the kind actors are told they are having, when people say an artist is “having a moment,” but her version was different. As she put it, she consciously passed on her moment.
That makes the new interview more than a retrospective on a breakout role. It shows an actress who understood the value of the spotlight and still walked away from it when it arrived. The unfinished question is not whether she had the chance, but which doors she left unopened when Phantom Thread put her at the center of the conversation.
