Diane Kruger, designer muse and former model, is no stranger to the high-fashion world, and her man, Joshua Jackson, comes along for the ride. Just last week the couple attended the Chanel couture show together in Paris. So at a MoMA screening of Kruger’s latest film, Farewell, My Queen, we asked Jackson if after exposure to the fashion world’s cognoscenti, does he “get” it now?
“I . . . get it,” he said after a moment’s thought. “I’m not sure I totally understand it yet, but I’m getting my education, slowly but surely.” Kruger gave VF Daily her assessment of Jackson’s fashion IQ: “He gets it like a straight man gets it,” she said.
The actor was well turned out in Rag & Bone at the Peggy Siegal Company–hosted screening, but said he still doesn’t have a lot of confidence in his own sense of style despite years of living with Kruger. “I have an in-house fashion critic now, so I never quite leave the house in the shambles I used to. She puts me on the right path if I’m dressing myself poorly,” he told us, laughing. “She’s an editor more than anything else.”
And Pacey finds novelty in hobnobbing with people like Karl Lagerfeld, who lives next door to the couple in Paris. “We randomly see him, like, just on the street sometimes,” Jackson explained. “He’s an incredibly, marvelously interesting man. But it’s strange to bump into him; he’s sort of a larger-than-life presence, so it’s odd to see him on the street.”
“Karl bizarrely loves Josh,” Kruger told us at a post-screening party at the French Embassy’s swanky Fifth Avenue cultural-services center. “Before he asks how I am, he would ask how Josh is,” she added. And Kruger says she has met the Kaiser’s famously chic cat, Choupette. “He’s obsessed!” she said, laughing. “An entire collection was inspired by his cat’s eyes.”
Is Choupette, you know, playful and friendly? Did she roll over for a belly rub, or is she fiercely aloof, secure in her superiority over the rest of us? “It’s a cat,” Kruger said with a shrug. “It’s a cat.”
Kruger plays Marie Antoinette in Farewell, My Queen, and director Benoit Jacquot told us how she convinced him to cast her as the Austrian-born queen of France. “She came to me and said, ‘Well, I’m born on the 14th of July, my mother is named Maria-Theresa, like Marie Antoinette’s [mother], and I’m German-speaking, so I’m the one. Nobody else. If you don’t have me in your film, your film is nothing.’ So I said O.K.”
“The wigs were the worst, because they were true to what wigs used to be then, and they were made out of horsehair, and so they’re very scratchy and not comfortable to wear at all,” Kruger said of filming the period piece at Versailles. “And so you couldn’t fix them like in modern days—you know, you have glue, and they sort of don’t move, but this kind of wig, it moves. So you have to walk very straight up.”
And wearing the complicated costumes was surprisingly inspirational. “I was worried that they were going to be in my way, trying to act,” Kruger admitted. “But it turned out to be a great help to slip into her character, because it took three people each day a half-hour to just get me in and out of those costumes, and I felt like that’s what she must have felt like, you know? So it became sort of my ritual each day to get into character.”
Kruger said that she just tried to be in the moment while shooting and gave up on trying to understand Marie Antoinette’s behavior. “I have no pretension of understanding her,” she said. “Well, how could we know? I didn’t attempt to have sympathy, or no sympathy. I didn’t want to judge her.”
