Vicky Krieps says she consciously passed on her Hollywood moment after Phantom Thread and stepped back while the attention around the film was building. She was 34 when the role put her in the awards conversation, but she did not treat that momentum like a permanent career lane.
“So what I did is I consciously passed on my moment,” Krieps said. She also said, “I did need a break, but I think every normal human being would need a break after [that],” and added, “Coming out and going to the Oscars… I didn’t come from this kind of fame. No one in my family or surroundings is famous. So you need a break just to process, and that’s what I did.”
Phantom Thread and the Oscars
2017 was the turning point, when Phantom Thread became Krieps’ breakout and later brought six Academy Award nominations into the conversation. She said she collected the gold statuette before Paul Thomas Anderson’s slew of awards began rolling in at the March ceremony, then stuck her tongue out at him on stage. That sequence put her in a very public awards run, and she said she chose distance instead of staying in the center of it.
“They love that story of ‘Vicky turning away from Hollywood,’” Krieps said. She pushed back on the neat version of that narrative too: “I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but an actor ‘has a moment,’” and “They’d say, ‘She’s having a moment!’” The line she is drawing is narrower than the legend around her — she says she did not reject Hollywood so much as refuse to let one success define the rest of her work.
Two little children, bigger pauses
“But that was mainly because I had two little children, and when you’re a mother and you have kids, I think your instincts can be much stronger,” Krieps said. She also said she had been adamant about taking career pauses from very early on, which makes the break sound less like a retreat and more like a rule she had already built into her working life.
That matters because the practical result was a return to Europe rather than a permanent exit from high-profile filmmaking. Krieps said she never came from fame, and she added that her instincts changed once she had children; the break became a way to process the attention instead of extending it.
South of France return
At the time of the interview, Krieps was shooting Bradley Cooper’s Ocean’s Eleven prequel in the South of France. That puts her back inside a Hollywood-linked project on European soil, which fits the pattern she described: not a rejection of the industry, but a deliberate choice about where and how to work.
She summed up the approach bluntly: “And I would fight for [these projects] until the very end of my life.” Which specific Hollywood opportunities she declined after Phantom Thread is not stated, but the bigger point is already plain — Krieps did not let an Oscar-season surge decide her schedule for her.
