Photography by Alexandre Gilbert
Cover Design by Yosef Phelan
Styling by Jonathan Huguet
Hair by Sonia Duchaussoy
Makeup by Caroline Fenouil

“It’s cool because, for once, people can see what I do!” laughs Vicky Krieps.

We’re speaking over Zoom while Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story – the highly controversial fourth season of Ryan Murphy’s crime anthology series – is riding high at number one on Netflix, and Krieps is still getting used to this particular flavour of visibility. The Luxembourgish-German actor has spent much of her career ricocheting between international productions and intimate European auteur cinema – from The Chambermaid Lynn (2014) and Bergman Island to Hold Me Tight (2021) and Corsage (2022) – work that lands you critical acclaim but doesn’t necessarily mean your taxi driver recognises you.

Monster is changing that. Krieps recently landed in Berlin and was instantly clocked by her driver. She tried to deny it. She failed!

“I’m such a bad liar,” she says. “I kept it up for five minutes until eventually I was like, ‘It’s meee!’”

Her driver had just finished Lizzie Borden and was a fan; his wife, meanwhile, was enraged with Krieps for [insert storyline here we won’t mention because, y’know, spoilers.] “Even my aunt and my cousins now see what I do – not everyone can always keep up with independent arthouse cinema.”

In Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story, Krieps plays Bridget Sullivan, housemaid to the affluent Borden family and, in Murphy’s retelling, eventual lover of Lizzie, whom she encourages to stand up to her parents by – it’s a tale as old as time – chopping them into pieces with an axe.

Set in 1892, Bridget – or rather “Maggie”, as the venomous Mrs Borden, played to sinister perfection by Rebecca Hall, insists on calling her – feels strikingly out of time. She’s sexually liberated, self-assured and, as I tell Krieps, rather punk-rock: a woman who seems to have time-travelled from somewhere far more contemporary into the Borden household.

“That was the idea,” Krieps says. “Ryan came to me with this role specifically knowing me, because I was on Ed Gein and he knew I loved to play, dress up, wear wigs and all that stuff. But at the same time, I’m always very interested in the truth and breaking the expectation. Also, I do have that punk element in me. So, the idea of making her this Mary Poppins punk-rock woman from the future, but at the same time out of nowhere, was probably because he saw that in me.”

'The idea of making Bridget this Mary Poppins punk-rock woman from the future was probably because Ryan Murphy saw that in me.'