Diane Kruger on having a surprise baby in her 40s: ‘I’m glad I didn’t have a kid at 30 – I would have resented it’

She’s starred opposite Brad Pitt and walked the runway for Marc Jacobs and countless more, but Diane Kruger is not immune to the illicit excitement (understood by parents of toddlers everywhere) of spending a night in a hotel room – alone. ‘I slept until nine o’clock today. I had dinner by myself… and I had a cocktail,’ she deadpans.

It’s a Monday morning in December and Diane is speaking to me via Zoom from Dublin. The 45-year-old actor is in Ireland to shoot Neil Jordan’s Marlowe, a film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Black-Eyed Blonde also starring Liam Neeson and Jessica Lange (of whom she admits to being an ardent fan, ‘and she plays my mother. So that was pretty daunting, to be honest’).

Bundled up against the cold in a chunky, striped knit (‘I just bought it in Mango’), her hair is still wet from the shower, there is a lick of eye make-up on her lids and her complexion has a sheeny, lit-from-within quality. ‘I feel like I’m on vacation,’ she says.

Last night was the first Diane has spent completely alone since welcoming a daughter with her fiancé Norman Reedus, the Walking Dead actor, three years ago. 

Kruger wears cady dress, £4,200, Valentino

‘You don’t really understand it until it happens. I feel like I’m now just coming up for air,’ she says. A first-time mother in her early 40s, she admits that she was not sure that having a baby was ever going to happen. ‘She was definitely a surprise. I sort of had given up on the idea of that happening. And then you know, things happen,’ she beams.

Bide your time to get what you really want – that could be the right motto for Diane, who, since making her 2004 debut in multiplexes alongside Pitt and Orlando Bloom in Troy, has triumphed as an icy Marlene Dietrich-esque screen queen in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, starred in the American TV remake of The Bridge, and won the Best Actress award at Cannes in 2017 for her performance as a grief-stricken mother in the German-language film In the Fade.

However, it is her latest role that is perhaps her most surprising to date – playing a no-holds-barred action hero in The 355, a female-driven spy flick (so called after the code name for the first female spy in the American Revolution). 

She stars alongside an ensemble cast of global heavy-hitters: Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong’o, Penélope Cruz and Bingbing Fan. ‘Pretty awesome girls,’ says Diane.

The film is the brainchild of Chastain, who wanted to create an unapologetically entertaining and unapologetically feminist genre movie, in which the leading talent are both the stars and the owners, meaning the actors will share in its profits. Chastain invited Diane to join the cast after Marion Cotillard, who had initially been attached, fell out of the picture.

Diane wears jacket, £850, and skirt, £855, both Tory Burch; sandals, £750, Jimmy Choo

‘She pitched it to me as this female-driven spy film that’s more Jason Bourne than Charlie’s Angels,’ says Diane, with just the teeniest eyebrow raise. 

And it’s a pretty apt description for a film that delivers big on explosions, fisticuffs and derring-do, while relieving its female leads of any obligation to be either self-deprecatingly goofy or gratuitously decorative. As Chastain puts it: ‘We didn’t have a studio telling us we had to wear certain outfits, or put in a dance number!’

Diane is a revelation in the movie, all dirt-smudged cheekbones, motorcycle leathers and simmering rage – like a balletic Bruce Willis, only in even tighter trousers. ‘You know, it’s fun to be a badass,’ she says, laughing. 

‘When do you ever get to do that?’ The role – her first since giving birth – was intensely physical and getting herself to the required level of fitness was a consideration.

‘Taking control over my own body again after having given birth, pregnancy and all those things,’ she says. ‘It felt like a boot camp at times. We would start with boxing and regular workouts and we all had our individual stunt person to learn the fight choreography, gun training, all that stuff.’ She says it took a few weeks ‘to get everyone on the same page… like, “OK, well they’re not going to kill each other.”’

Boot-camp training aside, Diane says there could not have been a more welcoming or empowering production for a new mum re-entering the Hollywood fray. Chastain ran a family-centric set and was assiduous about equitable power-sharing with her co-stars. 

‘We all had the same salary, the same trailers and were able to bring our children to set. When I look back on my career, it feels like it was one of the best on-set experiences I’ve ever had,’ says Diane. She also relished Chastain’s collaborative approach and having her ideas and opinions heard.

‘It really shows what women are, you know, we’re fierce, we’re scared, we’re strong, we’re mothers, we’re smart, we are all those things that you don’t ever get to see in genre movies.’ And she is happy to report that the five stars have remained fast friends since wrapping the film, and stay connected via WhatsApp.

Brought up in West Germany, in the village of Algermissen, with her younger brother Stefan, Diane’s early years were not so sunny. ‘I didn’t fit in where I was growing up. I felt different. I wanted to see the world. I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn’t want to stay in the village.’ 

Though she was a curious child, she did not get along with school. ‘I grew up having a very strict sort of Catholic upbringing, which I detested.’

Her unhappiness was exacerbated by her father’s alcoholism (her parents divorced when she was in her teens), and it’s not hard to imagine why circumstances propelled her to leave home as early as she could. 

She was a talented ballerina, studying at the Royal Ballet School in London in her summers, before an injury at 13 put paid to her ambition to dance professionally.

In the end, it was modelling that provided Diane with the escape route she was searching for, when, at 15, she won an Elite modelling competition in Germany and moved to Paris, fast-tracking her entrée into the fashion industry. 

‘It was just the best time of my life. I didn’t speak a word of French, living in a house of young girls. You know, no supervision. When I think about it now, the thought of my daughter going to Paris at 15, it’s crazy!’ she exclaims. ‘But I cannot thank my mother enough for giving me the greatest gift in life, which is trust.’

She says it was always the spirit of freedom that spurred her on, rather than partying (‘I didn’t even drink until I was 19’) or even the modelling scene per se. ‘It was something I’d never dreamt of – I don’t really look like a model, you know – I’m not 5ft 10in. I was not this typical “alien” model type. So it was like a gift.’

Still, she took to her new life with aplomb. ‘I was in New York once a week, Milan once a week and it just felt like the world was my oyster. At 16, having financial liberty, being able to pay your own rent, buy your own clothes, you know, help your parents – it just felt like “wow”.’ 

It was an exhilarating ride for about five years, before the novelty started to pall. ‘And then it just became a little lonely for me, a little redundant.’

Making the pivot to acting, as she has done so successfully, I wonder if she ever felt burdened by the preconceptions about her modelling career? Did she have to fight hard to be taken seriously?

‘You know, I didn’t feel like that. I mean, maybe behind my back people said something like this,’ she shrugs. ‘It’s taken me many years of paying my dues, which is in a way as it should be, learning the craft, and trying to be better with each picture.’

If modelling was the springboard out of Germany and the opening act of Diane’s life adventure, the second game-changing moment involved a homecoming of sorts, when she made In the Fade. 

At this point, she was an established Hollywood star, fêted not only for her acting résumé but for her red-carpet appearances, often alongside her beau Dawson’s Creek actor Joshua Jackson. But something else was calling her. 

She yearned to make a German-language film and pursued In the Fade director Fatih Akin, asking him to consider her. ‘In a way that changed my life a little bit. 

Obviously for my career, but as a human being as well.’ Diane prepped for the role by meeting people who had lost loved ones, including children, to murder. ‘That was the first time I really witnessed real-life grief. And it became a movie where I realised this really wasn’t about me and my performance, but about showing homage and respect to people who go through something like this,’ she says.

This was also a period of loss in Diane’s own life. She suffered two devastating bereavements when her grandmother and stepfather of 25 years passed away. Her decade-long relationship with Jackson came to an end around this time, too. ‘It just felt like kismet, in a way, coming together around this period,’ says Diane. 

‘I didn’t work for a good six months after that movie.’ Supporting her mother, who was consumed by grief, became a priority. ‘It was a bit of a reset in my life. I feel like it brought me closer to my family… and then meeting someone who ultimately will be the father of my child,’ she says. ‘Life – one door closes and another window opens.’

That man is actor Norman Reedus, whom she met on the set of their 2015 movie Sky. In some ways, Reedus is an actor who has also enjoyed a slow-burn career. At 52, he is the star of the enormously popular post-apocalyptic horror show The Walking Dead, where once he was perhaps best known as the partner (then ex) of supermodel Helena Christensen and father to their son Mingus, 21.

As for Diane and Reedus starting their own family, I ask if she ever wishes she’d had a baby a decade earlier? ‘I am so glad I did not have a kid at 30. I think I would have absolutely resented it for all the things that you have to give up, because today I am happy to do so. I have been to every party, I have been to every country that I wanted to visit. So I’m 100 per cent ready and willing to give my kid that attention. But at 30, I know I would not have been ready to do this properly.’

Life has been somewhat peripatetic for the trio, who mostly based themselves in Atlanta (where Reedus shoots The Walking Dead) when their daughter was very young and spent the lockdown months in Los Angeles. More recently, however, they have been settling into their town house in New York.

She thinks fatherhood is probably different for Reedus this time around, too. ‘He is completely under her thumb. When he’s around it’s like, “Papa, Papa, Papa!” They’re very cute together.’ As for the complexities around navigating a modern blended family, Diane says she does not regard herself as a stepmother to Mingus. 

‘He was 16 when I met him. He doesn’t live with his dad, so I would only see him sporadically,’ she says. ‘I’m not his stepmom… we’re friends.’ As Diane points out, she has actually known Christensen for much longer than she has known Reedus. ‘And you know, they have been split up for 16 years or something. So there is no weirdness. This year, we’re all spending Christmas together.’

Perhaps surprisingly – well, for a pair of card-carrying bohemians – Diane and Reedus recently got engaged. This is something that Diane has expressly said she was not going to do again (she was previously married in 2001 to French actor/director Guillaume Canet). What changed her mind, I wonder – motherhood, the pandemic, or was it just that he just asked?

‘All of the above,’ she answers, laughing. ‘I can’t even put my finger on what’s changed, because I’ve definitely said, “I’m never getting married again,”’ she says. ‘And who knows when we’re going to get married. But just the symbolism of that ring. It’s like a family heirloom, you know, because it’s going to be hers one day. I still look at my ring and think, “Wow, this is crazy!”’

Looking ahead to 2022, she feels excited about this next chapter in their family story. ‘Next year will be a big change for us for sure. It’s a year of redefining what we want to be and where we want to be as a family.’ 

Reedus is finishing his 12-year run on The Walking Dead, and this means one less stop on the commute back and forth between various film and TV sets and their home in New York.

Having said that, Diane has enrolled their daughter in the Montessori school system, which means she can tap into regular schooling if there happens to be a Montessori nursery where one of them is shooting. 

‘I’m trying to take the idea of a home base out of her head, you know, like we’re always home, because I’m the constant, or Grandma’s the constant, or Papa… like, we live in the world and we have friends everywhere. So we’ll see if it works,’ she says.

Kruger wears a verano dress, £1,350, Emilia Wickstead and satin mules, £625, Jimmy Choo

Her mother is very much a part of her daughter’s child-rearing squad, something that Diane feels profoundly grateful for. ‘I left home at 15, so we didn’t get to spend the fun years together. But now because of my daughter, it seems like we’re making up for lost times.’

One last topic to discuss: fashion. Has her style changed with motherhood? ‘For sure. I spend most of my days in the playground or getting dirty doing crafts. I’m literally in my pyjamas dropping off at school!’ 

And when she goes ‘out-out’? ‘I have to say, the labels haven’t changed. I love Prada, I love Chanel and Jason Wu.’ She recently gave up her Paris apartment, and when her boxes arrived in the US and she found herself unpacking all her fancy clothes from parties past, she admits, ‘I had a little tear of remembrance for my closet of beautiful things that I used to wear every day.’ She smiles. 

‘I kind of promised myself that starting next year, I’m going to make more of an effort and dress up during the week, or at least dress nicer,’ she laughs.

I’ll certainly be watching out for her taking those vintage Chanel pieces out for a twirl – whether pushing a swing or prepping for her next action movie on a motorcycle. She’ll be back! 

‘The 355’ is released on 7 January. Watch the trailer here.