Lars Eidinger: The Man Who Plays Monsters

Lars Eidinger

Sebastian Reuter

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’s Everyone Else (2009) to, in Matthias Glasner’s Dying (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 series All The Light We Cannot See (2023) and, last year, was the crazed purse thief chased down by George Clooney in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly.

Related Stories

Lifestyle

Salma Hayek Pinault, Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu Set to Co-Host Serpentine Summer Party (Exclusive)

Movies

Why Scarlett Johansson Dodged James Grey's Cannes FaceTime Call

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’s Superman sequel Man 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 drama Moulin, screening in competition, and is an architect who collaborates with both the Nazi and East German communist regimes in Volker Schlöndorff’s sweeping historic drama Visitation, 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 to The 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 in Moulin? 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 — was Persian 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 to Son 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.

(L to R): Gilles Lellouche as Jean Moulin and Lars Eidinger as Klaus Barbie in

László Nemes’ ‘Moulin’

@Szabolcs-Barakonyi

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 understan