in a booth in a SoHo restaurant, Diane Kruger is trying to convince me that she, too, sometimes has bad hair days when New York City gets humid. ‘I look like, you know, like someone put your fingers in a plug?’ says the actor. It’s a kind thing to say as my own barnet turns to candyfloss in front of her, yet such dishevelment is difficult to imagine.
Kruger, 48, looks sleek even when arriving, as she does, straight from the school run – all knife-sharp cheekbones and groomed eyebrows, her Hitchcock blonde hair swept back in a scrunchie. She wears a relatively low-key outfit of black jeans, brown loafers, a striped Marc Jacobs top and Frankie Shop bomber jacket, accessorised with a gobstopper engagement ring (her fiancé is The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus, father of her six-year-old daughter, Nova).
Kruger began her working life as a model. She was a favourite of Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel and was omnipresent as the face of Armani’s Acqua di Gio in the 1990s before breaking into Hollywood as Helen of Troy in Troy, 2004’s swords-and-sandals epic. She has since appeared in more than 50 movies and TV shows, including Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds and 2017’s German thriller In The Fade, for which she won Best Actress at Cannes. She is trilingual (she also speaks French), lives between New York and offered in Europe juicier. Despite a lot of progress in Hollywood, she says, ‘There’s still a ton of scripts where the woman is just “the girl”; she doesn’t move the story forward.’
Kruger’s latest project, six-part TV series Little Disasters, is very much female focused. Based on the Sarah Vaughan novel about a friendship group formed in a London antenatal group, Kruger plays Jess, a seemingly perfect stay-at-home mum whose life falls apart when her baby suffers an unexplained head injury. While preparing, Kruger interviewed several women who had struggled postpartum and used the shame they reported feeling as a basis for Jess’s character. For all the judgement society levies at mothers, she says, ‘The judgment women hold for themselves is sometimes harsher than anything.’
Kruger can relate. ‘I definitely have mom guilt. It’s long hours when you’re filming. It’s not a nine-to-five job where you’re gonna be home to have dinner with your kids. So I can relate in that sense to the guilt, and to trying to be present, to being overwhelmed and trying to juggle it all and be this perfect mom.’
Kruger’s juggle has unique complexities. She and Reedus, who she met while filming 2015 romance Sky, are both away filming a lot, though they try not to be apart beyond two weeks. ‘But we’ve definitely gone over that. Sometimes it’s out of your control.’ As star of The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon spinoff, Reedus has recently been shooting in Europe, so Kruger too has sought out European projects. Nova travels with her, which is ‘only possible because my mom comes’, she says. ‘We don’t have a nanny any more, only babysitters every once in a while. The guilt is less intense knowing that grandma’s home.’
There’s still a ton of scripts where the woman is just “the girl”; she doesn’t move the story forward.
Kruger grew up in a tiny German village. She has described her childhood as ‘chaotic’ as her father was an alcoholic. She was a dedicated ballet dancer forced out of dancing by an injury before she found modelling and left home at 15 to work in Paris. Looking back, she says, it was ‘nerve-racking. I had no money. I didn’t speak French. I had no cell phone!’
Both modelling and acting were rife with exploitation for young women in the ’90s – and in her experience, she says, the modelling world was ‘way worse’ than Hollywood. ‘You’re 15 or 16 and you’re working with people in their thirties. That brings out situations that are so inappropriate.’ At the time, speaking out did not feel like an option. Instead, ‘You’d have to navigate it. Between girls you’d talk, you’d know this photographer is such a… you know…’ Thankfully, such experiences are behind her. ‘I’m older now; people tend to respect you more.’ Plus, she believes, the culture has shifted. ‘I’ve worked with much younger actresses who’ve never encountered any of those situations. What’s really changed is that the younger generation speak up, they know someone will listen.’
Kruger did not want children when she was younger. ‘I didn’t want to give up the time or my career. Not that you have to give up all those things as a mom, but they’re not your priorities. And, you know, I didn’t want to get up early. I obviously would have done those things had it happened, but I’m sure I would have been very grumpy!’
Then, after breaking up with the Dawson’s Creek actor Joshua Jackson after a decade, she started dating Reedus and, in the early days, unexpectedly became pregnant. She was ‘the last one in my group’ to have kids, at the age of 42, and that turned out to be the best possible outcome. ‘It happened at the time I least expected and the time I most needed it,’ she says. It has also brought her closer to her mother. ‘We’ve spent more time together in the last four years than ever – with ups and downs, as you can imagine. But I’m incredibly grateful. I see what she must have gone through, pretty much as a single mom. There’s a lot of gratitude.’
Kruger clearly feels a huge responsibility as a parent. ‘You think about your own childhood your whole life, right?’ Then: ‘When you become a mom, you’re so conscious of curating your child’s life. They will make choices in their life based on those early years, and that’s amazing and terrifying.’ Having hated the strict Catholic school she attended (‘I felt like they were constantly clipping my wings’) she is a Montessori evangelist. ‘I always tell her, “School is only there to help you find what you love in life so you can make your dreams come true.” And so far, you know, she seems to be thriving.’
While travelling with Kruger, Nova has gone to nine different Montessoris, although she largely attends schools in New York and Paris. As in Little Disasters, Kruger is very involved in those parent communities. At first, she says, ‘it was very foreign. All of a sudden, you’re hanging out with people you probably would have never met.’ In the US, the level of involvement was ‘overwhelming’ at first. ‘I mean, the group chats! Now I really cherish it.’ So much so that, ‘in France, where it’s very hands off, it was really me who was like, “Can I get everybody’s emails?”’
Kruger loves New York, citing the city’s diversity, pace and culture, but she’s anxious about politics in the US and grateful to have one foot in Paris. The family are ‘downtown people’, she says. She loves ‘the old diners. I love a greasy egg in the morning.’ She is also part of a chic Manhattan blended family: Reedus has a grown-up child, Mingus, from his relationship with Helena Christensen. Being ‘in mom mode’ is just as busy as filming, of course, juggling Nova’s 6am wake-ups with school runs and bedtimes. The school days are short in New York, but just about give her time to read scripts on the elliptical exerciser; afternoons and weekends are often spent hosting Nova’s friends (the weekend before we meet, Kruger threw a 75th birthday lunch for her mother, serving moules frites and cake, and invited Nova’s friends over for an Easter egg hunt). Evenings in the city are perhaps less glamorous than they used to be before parenthood, and getting through a TV show can feel like an achievement. ‘Norman is a night person, he can’t ever go to sleep early, but he also doesn’t get up early, so we try to watch a show on the computer in bed – but I have yet to really make it to the end,’ she laughs. They did manage The White Lotus, ‘which we loved – and we are big RuPaul people’.
Kruger says she enjoys these ‘quotidian’ periods, all too aware how brief they are – two weeks after we meet she will attend the Cannes Film Festival, start promotions for a ‘very feminist’ adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons and, in July, will be back on a movie set. All of which she’ll do while organising schooling and travel and playdates for Nova – swan-like, feet paddling fast while projecting the appearance of one who is utterly unruffled above water.
‘Little Disasters’ will stream on Paramount+
Photographer - Tiffany Nicholson
Styling - Sarah Gore Reeves
Diane wears - (left) jacket, £2,650, and jeans, £990, both Fendi; (right) shirt, £1,550, trousers, £1,550, shoes, £1,150, and sunglasses, £400, all Fendi