On 25 February 2019, 11 days after she gave birth to her first child — a boy, Jan — the Polish actress Joanna Kulig put on an evening gown, packed up her breast pump and an emergency chicken sandwich, and went to the Oscars. She hadn’t intended to be in Los Angeles at the time, let alone to have just had a baby there, but she’d recently starred in a film, Cold War, directed by her compatriot Pawel Pawlikowski, which had received three Academy Award nominations — for best director, cinematography and foreign language film —and suddenly, the gears were turning.
“Oh my god! It was like the President campaign!” says Kulig, remembering the promotional push that the Oscar nominations engendered. She found herself on the European festival circuit, then called to New York, then on to LA. But her due date was getting closer, too; she explained her worries to her husband, the director Maciej Bochniak.
“I said to Maciej, ‘I’m too scared. I need to come back to my home and my mum.’ And Maciej said, ‘No, Joanna, it’s too late!’” She was too pregnant to fly. “It’s too late! Ha ha ha!”
Kulig, dressed in a fluffy white sweater and dark jeans, is telling me this in the private dining room of a modern hotel restaurant in Warsaw. It’s a grey, unexceptional February day, though Kulig, who laughs all the time and is prone to wild hand gestures, is irrepressible. She orders two scoops of vanilla ice cream (from the little I can make out from her conversation with the waitress, it’s because they’ve run out of banana) and regales me with funny actress-with-a-newborn-baby stories that put both of our pelvic floors to the test. (I just wrote “pelvic floors” in a men’s title! The times they are a-changin’.)
Though Cold War didn’t win any Oscars on 25 February, losing out to Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma, sticking around in town proved to be the right decision for Kulig. “This situation was great for me,” she says. “I met Damien Chazelle!” The writer-director of La La Land and First Man had a new drama series, The Eddy, about the personal and professional turmoil at a Parisian jazz club, and was casting the part of Kelly, the singer with the house band who has a troubled romantic past with the club’s co-owner Elliot, played by Moonlight’s André Holland. Three hours after Kulig performed for the show’s composers — “they wanted to check how fast I can learn English songs” — she was given the part (which was quickly changed from the American Kelly to the Polish Maja),“and I was super, super happy,” she remembers.
Chazelle had seen Cold War and taken note of Kulig’s unforgettable turn as Zula, a young singer cherry-picked to perform in a Polish folk ensemble that gets co-opted into promoting the Stalinist regime; Kulig’s performance won her Best Actress at the 2018 European Film Awards. Zula is bewitching and maddening in equal measure, as the folk ensemble’s musical director Wiktor (Tomasz Kot) discovers to his cost, and the film perhaps shares something of La La Land’s premise of musically gifted lovers whose stars never quite align (albeit in a black-and-white, arthouse kind of way). “Absolutely!”says Kulig. “When we shoot Cold War, very often I was listening to the songs from La La Land, and sometimes when I have a break I put on some songs and danced!”
Pawlikowski wrote Cold War with Kulig in mind, having cast her in smaller parts in two earlier films, The Woman in the Fifth and Ida.“The concept was very cool for me,” she says,“because it was folk music and I grew up in folk music.”
She was born the middle of five children and raised in Muszynka, southern Poland, a village of 400 residents — “mountain people” — before she was scouted, aged 15, to take part in Szansa na sukces (Chance of Success), a TV singing competition that earned her a degree of local fame. She went on to study singing and piano at prestigious music and theatre schools in Krakow, and later spent five years with the National Stary Theatre there. She’d struggled with acting at first, until one of her teachers told her,“Joanna, you have to act like you are singing”. Not surprisingly, many of her dramatic roles — Cold War and The Eddy included — have made the most of her exceptional voice.
The Eddy, which also stars Tahar Rahim and Amandla Stenberg, was shot in Paris over six months in 2019. “Another country, another culture... It was a really amazing project, I learned a lot, but for me, in this moment, it felt something like a war!” With a cast and crew speaking a mixture of English, French and occasional Arabic, for Kulig, the only Pole, it was a crash course in both French and English. “It was hard, but after two months you don’t stop to do translation, you feel more relaxed,” she says, “but it was like brain exercise.” (Her relative outsider status meant she was also able to observe the cultural tics of the others: “Sometimes the Americans were like, ‘French people don’t answer their emails very quickly!’”)
Since wrapping The Eddy, Kulig and her family have moved back to Poland, where, when we meet, Jan has just celebrated his first birthday. She wasn’t at the Oscars this year, though she had just returned from presenting at the European Awards, where she was photographed, beaming, with Pedro Almodóvar (“I said, ‘I would like to do a movie with you!’”).
As for the coming months, she has signed up to a Jérôme Salle film which, alongside The Eddy, if it gets a second series, will take her to Paris again. But first, a rest. “It’s a long trip from Muszynka to Oscar campaign,” says Kulig, as the room dims in the fading afternoon light.“I need a long break.”
The Eddy is on Netflix now
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Miranda Collinge is the Deputy Editor of Esquire, overseeing editorial commissioning for the brand. With a background in arts and entertainment journalism, she also writes widely herself, on topics ranging from Instagram fish to psychedelic supper clubs, and has written numerous cover profiles for the magazine including Cillian Murphy, Rami Malek and Tom Hardy.
