Lars Eidinger: The Man Who Plays Monsters

The world is about to see a lot more of Lars Eidinger.

The German actor is a towering leading man in his own country, whether onstage, were he is a member of the ensemble of Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre, or screen, from playing an introverted husband in a toxic relationship in Maren Ade’sEveryone Else(2009) to, in Matthias Glasner’sDying(2024), the most turbulent conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic since Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár. And he has skirted around the outskirts of international scene. He was the boyfriend of Kristen Stewart’s celebrity employer in Olivier Assayas’Personal Shopper(2016), played the main Nazi baddie in Netflix limited seriesAll The Light We Cannot See(2023) and, last year, was the crazed purse thief chased down by George Clooney in Noah Baumbach’sJay Kelly.

But soon the 50-year-old character actor will be joining the DCU and plotting to conquer and collect the world as Brainiac, the villain of James Gunn’sSupermansequelMan of Tomorrow.

Before that, Cannes is getting a double dose of Lars. He has two films in the festival this year. He plays Klaus Barbie — the infamous “Butcher of Lyon” — in László Nemes’ World War II dramaMoulin, screening in competition, and is an architect who collaborates with both the Nazi and East German communist regimes in Volker Schlöndorff’s sweeping historic dramaVisitation, playing as an out-of-competition Cannes Premiere.

Eidinger likely won’t make it to the Croisette this year — his DCU duties mean he’ll be shooting in the U.S. during the festival — but speaking toThe Hollywood Reporter, he reflected on playing everyone from Nazi war criminals to comic-book supervillains, and why he’s drawn to characters who force audiences to confront the uncomfortable parts of themselves.

Why did you say yes to the role of Klaus Barbie inMoulin? It’s almost like being asked to play Hitler.

Well, honestly, it was the person Klaus Barbie himself who drew me in. I probably wouldn’t have said yes if it had been yet another fictional Nazi character. I never used to understand why actors would categorically refuse to play Nazis, because I always assumed those were attractive, complex roles. But then my most recent one — which I told myself that would be my last Nazi role, the last wartime role — wasPersian Lessons. That experience was extreme — I came face to face with my own demons. My father was born during the war; my grandfather fought in it. I was raised by those people. I grew up with them, and that has a very direct influence on my personality, my character — it’s always present in my life.

After that film, I realized I’d rather free myself from that, and stop returning to that trauma again and again. Because it is a trauma that Germans carry around with them — the Second World War, the Shoah, the Holocaust. Then came a film with Shawn Levy,All the Lights We Cannot See. And I was drawn back in, because colleagues like Mark Ruffalo were involved, the fact that it was American, and Shawn Levy made it interesting. But I told myself: absolutely the last time.

Then came the call from László Nemes. I thought back toSon of Saul— a very good film and a very skillful use of the device of telling the story of a concentration camp through the perspective of one person, essentially through the protagonist’s face.

I thought, “László Nemes is surely an interesting interlocutor for engaging with this subject one more time.” And as for Klaus Barbie specifically — you’re absolutely right, he occupies an extreme place; there’s almost no one who doesn’t know that name. That’s what drew me: to engage with this character. And especially with the history surrounding him — not in the film, but what I find so fascinating: how he was dealt with after the war, how long he remained active, that he even worked for the Americans and ended up involved in the drug trade. As a biography, that’s quite staggering and very revealing about an era. That’s really what wakes my interest: when something documents a period, captures what defined a time.

Do you find empathy for all characters you play — even someone who seems like a monster?

Of course, my goal as an actor is to feel empathy for the character — empathy in the sense that I understand, that I try to inhabit the character’s logic and perspective. My method is to start by gathering as much material as possible. With Klaus Barbie, that’s possible — you can watch how he spoke, how others described him. There’s Max Ophüls’ magnificent documentaryHotel Terminus(1988), where survivors recount their experiences with him.

I took all of that in, and then at a certain point I set it aside and just worked from the text, the script. Experience has taught me that too much imitation can paralyze you. I try to be freer, to treat it as fiction again. The interpretation of Klaus Barbie inMoulindiffers from the original. The historical Barbie is described as very sadistic, physically aggressive — someone who enters a room and strikes people on the head, leaving them unconscious during interrogations. They often couldn’t even recall afterward what they’d said, because the torture had rendered them senseless. That violence, that physical violence, essentially doesn’t appear in our film. That’s a deliberate choice — I discussed it with László, and I was uncertain at first whether it was right. But what it underscores is that we are dealing with fiction.

And there’s a tension there: The film always flirts with the temptation for the viewer to walk out and think, “That’s how it was.” That’s what the film plays with. That’s the great responsibility you carry, and the great danger — that you partly falsify history, because the viewer always thinks they now know how it was. You watchDownfall(2004), and leave the cinema believing you know what happened in [Hitler’s] bunker. Which is, in a certain sense, fatal. You have to keep that responsibility in mind as an actor.

Your other Cannes role isVisitation,which also features someone who functions within an authoritarian system: an architect, an artist, whose choices make him complicit, first with the Nazi regime, then with the dictatorship in East Germany. Was that the draw?

Yes, exactly — the theme is actually very comparable. In that film, and in the source novel, the architect’s wife [played by Susanne Wolff] is more critical, while my character initially functions very well within the system. That was very important to me, because in hindsight it’s always easy to say you would have resisted, you would have distanced yourself. But from within the system, from within the time itself, it’s often not that simple.

I can equally imagine that generations following ours will distance themselves from certain behaviors — capitalism, for instance, has its dark sides that we often ignore, we function within the system knowing full well how much injustice it entails.

When I say I play a character with empathy, I mean I want to bring the audience into the same conflict the character is in, and also feel which parts of themselves they share with these figures. The greatest danger in art and filmmaking is holding it at arm’s length, observing from a safe distance. My great ambition is always to engage with these figures — to sound the notes I share with them, to put myself in relation to them rather than distancing myself. To be genuinely empathetic.

You don’t seem interested in being liked. You consistently choose roles that aren’t designed to win over an audience. Is provocation part of the aim?

I believe the figure of the classic hero is actually a far less realistic figure — it’s a pure fiction. And you engage with it differently, because the hero creates distance: You feel you can’t identify, you look up to this figure.

There’s a quote from Charles Manson — the serial killer — who said: “Look down at me and you see a fool, look up at me and you see a god, look straight at me and you see yourself.” Obviously, it’s always a little piquant to quote a serial killer — but the thought itself is interesting: You recognize yourself in the figure. And that’s the highest ambition of art: to confront people with themselves. Being liked isn’t really a criterion. I pursue figures — or they pursue me — that I feel bring out certain parts of myself, and of the viewer, that perhaps they weren’t consciously aware of but can discover there. It’s always a form of reflection, of self-examination. The antihero, in my experience, is a far better vehicle for identification than the classic hero.

And yet you are playing the villain in the new Superman movie,Man of Tomorrow. What drew you to a franchise like that?

It’s not as different as you might think. Even if it seems surprising at first, these films have a serious philosophical ambition. They carry great allegorical weight for me. Take just the word “super” — it’s used as a superlative, for something excellent, wonderful. But “super” really only means “over” or “above.” So Superman is the Übermensch. You have the Super Ego. There’s already a deep psychological dimension built in.

Last week I was on set during rehearsals and asked if I could watch some of the filming, which had already started. And I saw an actor in the Superman costume, suspended on wires in front of a bluescreen. I looked at that image and thought: This is the essence of fiction. It’s as significant an image as Hamlet holding the skull: Superman, in that Superman pose, hanging from wires in front of a bluescreen.

Being in the Superman universe wasn’t a dream or burning desire for me. But now that it’s happening, I can see a certain inevitability in it, something almost fated.

You’re known as a stage actor — yourHamletis renowned. Is there a connection between your theater work and what you do onscreen?

Yes, the theatrical quality has actually helped me enormously in the context ofSuperman, too, because it involves a different register of performance, one that isn’t primarily realistic and allows for a far more expressive style of playing. When I watch a film like James Gunn’sGuardians of the Galaxy, I find it has a great theatrical quality — in the handling of good and evil, and in a certain tendency toward allegory. Brainiac is described as the incarnation of Satan. I find that almost Shakespearean. The king, the fool — there are so many parallels for me.

German actors abroad are often pigeonholed as villains. Does that bother you?

Well, that’s not really my way of thinking, honestly — I can understand it, but I believe one of the great errors of our time, or perhaps of human beings in general, is the longing to divide everything into good and evil. In psychology that’s called black-and-white thinking — thinking in extremes. It’s described as a cognitive distortion, a form of madness, which I find interesting: It’s essentially borderline behavior, to say there’s only black and white, good and evil, and to miss how the world actually presents itself — in contradictions, in gray zones, in nuances.

I think that’s ultimately why I try, even with dark characters, to portray them as ambivalent beings. I would do the same playing a good person: I’d search for the darkness within the good. My general ambition in art is to play against this kind of thinking, against moral simplification. I engage a great deal with [Bertolt] Brecht — I’m doing a Brecht reading tour across German-speaking countries, and I always close with “An die Nachgeborenen,” [which translates] “To Those Born After.” It begins: “I live in dark times.” And Brecht describes those dark times. I guarantee you: Everyone in the room hearing it for the first time thinks I’m speaking about now, about our present moment. But it was written [before] the Second World War. It describes something immanent to human beings — what makes us human. “The fate of man is man.” That’s what interests me: to examine what makes a human being. And that’s why it matters to me to say: With Klaus Barbie, it’s not about monsters. It’s about human beings.