After shooting Phantom Thread, Vicky Krieps and Daniel Day-Lewis made a pact to shave their heads. “I didn’t, because I had to work on something,” Krieps tells Dazed. “But Daniel did. And now I’ve done it all these years later.” Krieps sports her bald look in a new film, Love Me Tender, a heartbreaking French drama about a queer writer defying social norms. Do actors relish that physical transformation? “I think actors enjoy becoming something else. When you shave your head, it’s like you go back to zero.”

Krieps, whose hair has since grown back, is in London, in late July, hours before a Q&A screening of Love Me Tender. Adapted by Anna Cazenave Cambet from Constance Debré’s 2020 autobiographical novel, it might be the 42-year-old actor’s toughest role to date. Her character, Clémence Delcourt, a renamed version of Debré, is constantly in emotional turmoil or physical activity (swimming, cycling, sex) to survive each day. As Debré did, Clémence shaves her head to start anew.

“We shot with no budget, always overtime, and non-chronologically at the peak of summer and in the middle of winter,” says Krieps. “It was so difficult, you wouldn’t believe it. Any one of my Hollywood colleagues would have left and gone home.” At least the head-shaving added a point of division? “No! Most of the film, I’m wearing a wig.” Unlike in films like Bugonia, the head-shaving occurs off-screen. “We’ve seen it many times, and it always has something victimising in our minds. Anna wanted for her to casually do it, and then it’s done.”

Debré’s book opens with two shocking sentences: “I don’t see why the love between a mother and son should be any different from other kinds of love. Why shouldn’t we be allowed to stop loving each other?” While Love Me Tender eases viewers into that notion, it’s a film that reaches a similar conclusion while touching on several taboos along the way. After divorcing her husband, Laurent (Antoine Reinartz), with whom she shares an eight-year-old son, Clémence dates women and quits her job as a lawyer to write books. In a custody battle, Laurent uses photographs of Clémence at gay pride events to argue that she’s an unfit mother. In addition to blatant homophobia, he derides Clémence for betraying her child by leaving the legal profession.

“It’s hard to finance films like this because people keep saying, ‘We cannot have a woman who’s not sympathetic.’ But who asks that question about Taxi Driver? No one. When it’s a difficult woman, it becomes a problem”

With little access to her son, Clémence is effectively punished for exhibiting stereotypically masculine behaviours. Debré refers to herself in the book as a cowboy. “It’s intentional that in one of the first scenes, you see her coming out with a cigarette like Lucky Luke,” says Krieps. “It’s hard to finance films like this because people keep saying, ‘We cannot have a woman who’s not sympathetic.’ But who asks that question about Taxi Driver? No one. When it’s a difficult woman, it becomes a problem.”

Born in Luxembourg and now based in Berlin, Krieps is somewhat of a specialist when it comes to “difficult women”. As well as her breakthrough role in Phantom Thread as Alma, a combative waitress who overpowers a fashion megalomaniac, there’s the rebellious empress of Corsage, the mother who walks out on her family in Hold Me Tight, and the bickering sibling of Father Sister Mother Brother. Krieps’s version of a Hollywood diversion is M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, a horror in which her character suffers from sci-fi levels of pain for two hours.

Krieps is also a mother to two children. The parallel to Clémence swapping her lawyer job for literature isn’t lost on Krieps. “I made choices in my life that manoeuvred me away from a lot of money, towards very little money,” she says. “I didn’t go through what she went through, but I’ve been up against the same walls. There’s not much understanding in this world when a woman decides to be an artist rather than do whatever she can to make more money for her kids.”

“It’s shocking to hear that a woman wants to be free – so free that she lets go of the child. But underneath, she’s looking out for him. When you love your child truly, you know how to let go of them.”

She recalls turning down a Berlin-based TV show for artistic reasons. People around her questioned the decision. “I was shocked. You wouldn’t tell an open-heart surgeon to become a doctor in his children’s village so that he can cook them lunch every day. No one would ask that of a man or a doctor. But I get asked so many times: how dare I go and make art that takes me away from my kids, and then also doesn’t pay enough to buy a big house.”

Before they shot the film, Krieps spoke to her Bergman Island director Mia Hansen-Løve about Love Me Tender. At the end of the book, Debré gives up the custody battle, which is a bit like Marriage Story ending 30 minutes early. Whereas Hansen-Løve found this conclusion “hard”, Krieps interpreted it as hopeful. “I always read it as, being a lawyer, she knows that this fight will go on for the next six years, which means that this child will spend six years in courtrooms with fighting parents. She understands that she has to let go for her child to become happy. She emphasises her freedom. It’s shocking to hear that a woman wants to be free – so free that she lets go of the child. But underneath, she’s looking out for him. When you love your child truly, you know how to let go of them.”

It’s implied that Laurent is retaliating out of emasculation: he can’t handle his ex-wife dating women. Although Clémence freely explores the queer scene and its nightlife, she later bans her girlfriend, Sarah (Monia Chokri), from meeting her son in case it’s used against her in court. Clémence’s sexuality, then, is key to the film, and Krieps might be the first person to ever publicly admit she was nervous as a straight person to do gay sex scenes correctly. “I’ll give you an example,” she says. “I’m not a lesbian. How do I know how to kiss a breast, or touch it, if I haven’t done it before, and if I don’t naturally have the reflex of doing so?”

Why do actors never declare this when promoting their films? “Because they’re lying,” she says with a laugh. “As an actor, you can ‘act’. I can be out of breath when I’m not out of breath. But what I speak of is respect. I respect these people. I know I’m not part of that world. I don’t want to offend anyone. What if my idea of it is wrong? Of course, once you go into it, it becomes very natural because lovemaking is lovemaking. Lovemaking has no agenda, no skin colour, no time, no anything.”

Right now, Krieps is working on a prequel to Ocean’s Eleven with Margot Robbie and Bradley Cooper, which she describes as “like going to a summer camp where everyone is excited that tomorrow is lake day”. I confess to being a bit surprised that Krieps was recently announced as being part of Joy of Sex, a British romcom from the director of Bridget Jones’s Diary. “I came on board because people are going backwards, and becoming more and more repressed, and not saying their feelings or what they want,” she says, prompting a giggle. “I laugh about myself. I always have these ideas that I have to fight for the good. Here’s the same.”

Love Me Tender is out in UK cinemas on August 7