When Isabelle Huppert accepted the lead in Ulrike Ottinger’s The Blood Countess, it marked an unusual first: the prolific French actress — now credited with her 158th screen role — was finally portraying a vampire. The film reimagines the legend of Erzsébet Báthory in contemporary Vienna, pairing baroque visuals with whimsical horror. Huppert spoke about the part during a conversation at the Luxembourg Film Festival, bringing warmth, humor and curiosity to questions about costume, language and performance style. This interview revisits those remarks while also situating the film within Ottinger’s long-held vision and Huppert’s wider career.
The Blood Countess follows the undead countess as she emerges from hiding to join forces with her retainer Hermine and her nephew, the vegetarian vampire Rudi Bubi, on a hunt for a mythical book that could annihilate evil — a prize that would, intriguingly, upset their own needs. Ottinger’s screenplay includes contributions from Elfriede Jelinek, and the cast features international names such as Birgit Minichmayr, Lars Eidinger and a cameo by local icon Conchita Wurst. The project, first conceived in 1998, eventually found Huppert on board many years later, shifting her from a proposed supporting role into the central figure.
The freedom of theatricality and the choice to avoid genre study
Huppert explained that she approached the role without replaying an archive of vampire films, opting instead for a kind of creative naivety that suited Ottinger’s aesthetic. She described how the director’s affinity for theatrical staging granted actors a release from conventional psychological realism: the emphasis on stylized performance and visual tableau allows a different set of priorities than strict naturalism. Ottinger’s method encourages performers to treat the story as a tale — an intentionally timeless narrative — where the actor’s task is less about exhaustive backstory and more about inhabiting a sequence of evocative moments and gestures.
Collaboration, language and costume as creative tools
Despite Huppert’s signature on many character-driven dramas like Paul Verhoeven’s Elle and Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher, she welcomed Ottinger’s mercurial world. The director’s use of multilingual casting — with lines shifted between French, German, Russian and even a Hungarian phrase nodding to Báthory’s origin — was intentionally porous. Huppert noted that blurring languages avoids the stilted feel of forced co-productions and becomes a creative asset: the film’s linguistic plurality functions as a dramatic texture that underlines the borderless, dreamlike quality of Ottinger’s universe.
The role of design
Costume and hair played a decisive part in forming Huppert’s performance, though she laughed off the idea that she entered roles through wigs in the Hollywood sense. The film’s period-agnostic wardrobe, the Viennese locations and the ornate production design all add directional cues that free an actor from literal interpretation. Huppert emphasized how the visual apparatus supplied an attitude — a posture and rhythm — that allowed her to play with irony, distance and a kind of gleeful theatrical menace without needing a hyper-documented psychological history.
Reflections on long-term projects and future collaborations
Ottinger’s project gestated for decades before production, and Huppert joined the story later in its life, first considered for a supporting role before becoming the lead. She spoke about what she looks for in collaborators: a sense of trust that transcends how many films a director has already made. For Huppert, experience is not a guarantee of creative security; instead she values the present moment on set and the implicit pact between actor and filmmaker. That ethos explains her readiness to work with both established auteurs and emerging voices alike.
Other recent work and festival life
Aside from Ottinger’s fantasia, Huppert mentioned enjoying her work with Asghar Farhadi on the upcoming Parallel Tales, in which she plays a writer, and expressed openness to reuniting with directors like Mia Hansen-Løve, whose film Things to Come she praised. Festivals have framed much of this trajectory: retrospectives, such as the one Huppert helped shape by consulting on selections and program notes, and premieres at events like the Berlinale have spotlighted both her career and Ottinger’s distinctive practice. The result is an image of an artist who remains engaged, adventurous and attentive to the collaborative life of cinema.