In a past life, Zoë Bleu was probably a priest. She was likely performing purification rituals, telling stories day and night of old Gods and their cycles of life, death, and rebirth; her dreams prophetic, her words labyrinthine, her eyes wide and receiving, staring blindingly into the sun.

“I’m quite spiritual. I’m not religious, but I’m almost religious about how spiritual I am,” Bleu tells me over Zoom, an artifice that, five millennia from now, might hold as much mystery to us as an obelisk. She’s sitting on her bed in her Paris apartment situated within steps of Notre-Dame, having recently returned from a New Year’s trip to Japan. Above her head of long chestnut tresses is a sphinx, printed in yellow and orange hues. “I went to Egypt, and I felt like I was vibrating.”

In this lifetime, Zoë Bleu is many things. She’s an artist, a lover of historical fashion, a model, a double Scorpio, a musician, a world traveler, and an actor. Her film, Dracula, directed by Luc Besson (Leon: The Professional), debuted in US theaters in February after a theatrical run in Europe. It’s a fresh take on the Bram Stoker classic that suggests that love is, above all else, worth the ultimate sacrifice. She stars opposite Caleb Landry Jones (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) as Elisabeta, Dracula’s late wife, and then as her reincarnation, Mina Murray. It’s a part that feels tailor-made for Bleu, with all her many faces and facets, despite its original iteration being published nearly 130 years ago.

One could argue that timing—or perhaps a sense of alignment—brought the actor and the film together. The only daughter of Rosanna Arquette, Bleu comes from one of today’s most recognizable acting families. Yet, she has spent much of her life up until this point deliberately outside the spotlight, studying medieval art history at Sarah Lawrence College, acting in independent and short films, and writing poetry. It was her co-star, Jones, who first recommended Bleu to Besson for the role. Only later did a personal connection surface.

“When Luc figured out that I was actually my mother’s daughter—because he had made a film with her in the 80s—he was much more intrigued to meet me,” Bleu recalls. “We talked about life and love, and he was just picking my brain a bit.”

Her own history aside, Bleu’s approach to her creative work is rooted in fantasy. In the months leading up to filming Dracula, she wrote letters to Elisabeta and Mina each night before bed, hoping to induce a subconscious sync, like some kind of phantasmic triangle.

“Some of the rooms and places from the set showed up in my dreams,” she tells me. A stained glass window, a wooded area near Besson’s house that served as a forest surrounding the castle in the film, all appeared in Bleu’s mind’s eye as she slept.

“There were 300 deer that lived on his property. I kept waking up in the middle of the night after dreaming about all of these deer in the forest. The image of the deer became really significant for me when it came to distinguishing Elisabeta’s energy from Mina’s,” she continues. Princess Elisabeta, a stoic stag with vine-adorned antlers, and Mina, fresh and wobbly, a Bambi-like deer in the headlights.

These distinctions, found in the subconscious, weren’t the only ways in which Bleu found Elisabeta and Mina. Bleu listened to Radiohead’s “Pyramid Song” on repeat to sink deeper into the film’s haunting headspace. “All my lovers were there with me / All my past and futures / And we all went to heaven in a little row boat / There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt,” Thom Yorke croons over a looming, minimalist piano line. The song became both a soundtrack and a séance; the past, present, and imagined selves drifting together until Elisabeta and Mina felt not invented, but remembered.

“I just love the idea that music has that power, because it does, at least for me in my personal life,” Bleu explains. A musician herself—she records alt-pop tracks under the name L’ESPIRAL with producer Reggie Debris—she curated playlists for each character, with a few of the same songs on each playlist, connecting one life to the other, in perpetuity. “It was haunting me, and I wanted to feel haunted by that music.”

For a creative mind like Bleu’s, these intangible strings tie together nicely. For years prior to working on Dracula, she was known to create entire worlds, narratives, and lives from her clothes. Scroll through her Instagram feed, or peruse her line KAKA Couture (see: the pale green gown Patricia Arquette wore to the 29th annual SAG Awards), and you’ll find yourself in the whimsical and surreal world in which Bleu lives.

“I always used garments to portray characters in an unsaid way, or to say something about how I was feeling,” she says. She’s wearing a thick white turtleneck sweater and a large blue stone wrapped into a silver ring on her index finger. “This is where I get to be in these different worlds and dress up as these different people and shapeshift.”

In the moments between rehearsing lines and takes on the project of her dreams in the city that she loves (she tells me she manifested everything, including the French work visa), Zoë Bleu is not a princess or a vampire or any musical persona she could dream up in that imagination of hers. She’s Zoë. And sometimes, that was scary, she tells me. In those moments, when she’s feeling stressed, Zoë Bleu turns to the Gregorian chants and prayers of 11th-century nun Hildegard von Bingen.

“I was doing these prayers every morning, just to ground myself, because you have to, to do most things, especially when you’re on a big set like this. There’s a lot of pressure. I needed to ground myself every morning and be in my body and not go into full panic,” she says. “The fact that it’s music, really, that made me connect with that spiritual side of myself in relation to this film. Music is the thread that weaves it all together.”

All of it—the dreams, the garments, the playlists, the prayers—ultimately funnels into something larger than process or performance. For Bleu, Dracula becomes a kind of offering: a dream-space carefully built against the weight of the present moment. It’s a film shaped by softness in a hard world, by love resurrected in an era that often feels allergic to tenderness.

“The world is really cuckoo and dark at the moment, and there’s a lot of violence and hatred going on. This is a beautiful love story, and you wouldn’t think it to be, because it’s Dracula, but you leave our film feeling really warm and full of love,” Bleu tells me. “I’d like someone out there to leave our film feeling lighter, because it’s really hard to feel light and feel positive feelings when there’s so much darkness going on. If we could just take someone away from all of that for a moment and into this dream world that we built, that’s filled with love and magic, that would be my hope, that someone gets to leave this world behind and enter ours for a moment and leave feeling touched.”

Photographed by Jason Renaud

Styled by Britton Litow

Written by Abby Shewmaker

Hair: Daniel Kim at Opus Beauty

Makeup: Amy Chance at Celestine Agency

Stylist Assistant: Madeleine Collins