How Diane Kruger: ‘Everything Changed With Motherhood’

New mothers—no shame to all those self-love adage sharers on Instagram—actually often do have goals that involve changing themselves. Their ambitions can be simple, like: “I wish to travel beyond the bounds of my living room.” They can be physical, like: “I want to return, full steam, to my HIIT class.” They can be amorphous and hard to define, like: “I want to feel like myself again.” The road to getting there is anyone’s best guess. For Diane Kruger, 45, who gave birth to a daughter with actor Norman Reedus in November of 2018, the goals were of the specific, if unusual, sort: She wanted to regain the kind of control over her body that would allow her to do a roundhouse kick, to move with military precision while wielding a weapon, to unflinchingly jog up a 35-foot crane suspended in midair. The physical aspirations stemmed from preparing for her role in the film The 355 (in theaters January 7), which shot in London during the summer of 2019. In it, she plays a spy from her native Germany in an all-female team (portrayed by Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o, and Fan Bingbing) that comes together to prevent a device that can unleash global catastrophe from falling into dangerous hands. The movie is fun and exhilarating and packed with women (all over 30, by the way, which feels like a palate cleanser) doing nonhokey, no-holds-barred action. “Jessica really wanted to make it closer to a Bourne franchise,” says Diane of Chastain, who was one of the producers on the film. “She and the director, Simon Kinberg, wanted the stunts to be just as fierce as a man would make them, without making a big deal out of it.” True to that mission, Diane’s action sequences in the film are savage. Her style of fighting (meant to mimic how a German spy would be trained in real life) is gritty, inspired by the self-defense system Krav Maga. She is brusque and unforgivingly strong for the entire two hours of the film, sprinting through Paris and facing off with Chastain in a walk-in freezer in one memorable scene. This physicality—impressive for anyone—seems all the more astounding when you learn that Diane was six months postpartum when she started training. “It was daunting,” she says of making the decision to dive from one end of the activity spectrum to the other. “But after six months of being a full-time mom, I was ready to get back to me, and to get out of the house. It was fun to have a few hours away each day to focus on my body and my work.” Diane is speaking on a video call from her apartment in New York, dressed in a chic tan sweatsuit, her feet curled up on her desk chair. “It was exhilarating to go back to working out—to lifting heavy, kicking higher, and trusting my body.” While she had to build her strength back up, Diane had actually never stopped moving. Throughout her pregnancy, she worked out for 30 minutes a day, walking, doing the elliptical, or performing a squat routine with five-pound weights. Diane is diligent, that’s for sure.