An American star flies to Paris to slip into a legendary silent-film costume, and by the time filming wraps on Irma Vep, it is no longer clear where the role ends and she begins.
What is Irma Vep about?
Mira arrives in France fresh off a bruising breakup and a career she has grown quietly disillusioned with, hired to headline a French production remaking the silent classic Les Vampires. She is cast as Irma Vep, the black-catsuited jewel thief at the center of the original film, and steps onto a set already tangled in its own history, tensions and half-buried rivalries. As production drags on against the backdrop of a lurid, real-world crime plot swirling around the shoot, the boundary between Mira and the character she is playing starts to dissolve, and the miniseries follows that blur through the daily friction of filmmaking itself, its egos, its compromises and its strange late-night intimacies.
About the cast
Alicia Vikander stars as Mira, with Vincent Macaigne, Adria Arjona, Byron Bowers, Jeanne Balibar, Vincent Lacoste, Nora Hamzawi and Hippolyte Girardot filling out the cast and crew of the production she has stepped into.
Context & significance
Irma Vep was written and directed by Olivier Assayas, adapting his own 1996 feature film of the same name into an eight-episode miniseries that premiered in 2022. Assayas keeps the film's premise, a remake of Louis Feuillade's 1915 silent serial Les Vampires, but stretches it across a longer form that lets him dwell on the set as its own ecosystem, populated by directors, actors and crew who are as much a part of the story as the fictional heist plot they are filming. The result is a French-American co-production that treats a film shoot itself as a subject, using the fictional remake as a lens on stardom, obsession and the porous line between performer and role.
Watching Irma Vep on Ktime
Irma Vep is available to watch on K-Time with a free account login, and the page is open to browse without signing in. Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles are both available for this title, so viewers can follow Mira's story in Farsi or watch the original performances with Farsi subtitles, within K-Time's Persian-language interface for the diaspora audience.