Diane Kruger: ‘I turned down films involving Nazis'

Telegraph

21-05-2025

Diane Kruger has avoided looking at the trailer for her new TV show, Little Disasters. She plays a wealthy, overstretched new mother, Jess, who is under investigation by social services after her baby daughter is taken to hospital with an unexplained head injury, and it's fair to say she spends much of the tautly filmed, largely London-set series appearing pinched with stress.
'I look terrible,' she corrects. 'Obviously it's deliberate: my colour palette on the show was 'death row'. But to look 10 times worse when you emerge from make-up than when you went in – it really f--ks with your head. So on the weekends during filming I had zero problem saying: 'I'm going to spend an hour in the bathroom putting on make up and I'm going to look great.''
This is a surprise. Many famous actresses who are acclaimed for their appearance (the German-born Kruger, 48, twice appeared on the Maxim Hot 100 list during the Noughties) aren't too keen on talking about it. 'These days, when someone says to me 'Oh you are beautiful', then I really hear it. And I thank them for saying it. I love getting dressed up. Because when I was younger I felt as though I wasn't always allowed to be one hundred per cent [beautiful]. It always felt like I had to [prove I was more]. It feels good to be looked at.'
She's talking via Zoom from New York where the actress lives part of the year with her American husband, the Walking Dead actor Norman Reedus, and their six-year-old daughter Nova. She's dressed down in cream leisure wear, blond hair neatly tied back. She exudes effortless gloss, and she knows better than anyone the extent to which her genetics have both helped and hindered her career.
In 2006, the New York Times critic Manohla Dargis dismissed her as 'too beautiful to play a role of any substance', following Kruger 's breakthrough performance as Helen in Troy, Wolfgang Petersen's 2004 star-studded, megabucks spin on the Iliad. 'I got that part because of the way I looked and I am sure I got other parts because of the way I looked, and I have made a career out of endorsement deals because of the way I look,' she says furiously.
'So when I was younger I was very conscious of my face being a way of getting a foot inside the door.' She stops for breath. 'But, that review was below the belt and it's stuck with me ever since. I couldn't believe that another woman, who was probably two or three times my age, would write that about an actress just starting out. And I've tried very hard to avoid being typecast, because there was a real risk after Troy that it might happen.'
And so here we are, discussing a two-decade career encompassing action thrillers, Tarantino comedy, European arthouse, a Cannes-winning turn in the German political thriller In The Fade, David Cronenberg's forthcoming film The Shrouds and, now, a Big Little Lies-style psychological whodunnit.
Little Disasters, also starring Jo Joyner, is both a sharply observed portrait of competitive middle-class parenting and a compassionate study of a woman cracking under the pressures of a newborn. Kruger gives a fierce performance of a perfectionist mother of three who has struggled to bond with her infant daughter. 'Within the community of mothers you can find incredible support, but also incredible judgment,' she says.
Kruger grew up in a tiny Catholic town outside Hanover in West Germany and as a child trained to be a ballerina. 'My dad was an alcoholic, so it was always very tumultuous,' she says. 'Ballet felt like the only way, to not escape it necessarily, but to feel it. I was able to put all those emotions into a physical performance.' A knee injury put paid to her dreams, so when she won an Elite Model contest, she leapt at the chance to move to Paris. It was the mid-1990s, the modelling scene was wild and Kruger was still a teenager. 'But I was not a party girl at all. My mum had said, 'If I hear any stories, you're coming back', so I never went out.'
Soon she became disillusioned and lonely. 'I love fashion, and wearing the pretty frocks, but as you get older you want to be more in charge of how you are presented. I also felt lost, always being on the road. I've got very classic features, I was never a Kate Moss, so I wasn't part of the cool kids club, either. I thought: 'There has got to more to life than this.''
She took small parts in French films and was then cast in Troy. She followed that most notably with Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds then Kruger, who attended drama school in France and is trilingual, turned her attention fully to French cinema.
Has she always felt that Hollywood had little of interest to offer her? 'It cuts both ways,' she says coolly – there's no PR-trained flannel with Kruger. 'Maybe Hollywood wasn't interested in me, either. But it's certainly more seamless to age as an actress in France. Catherine Deneuve [who is 81] headlined a couple of movies recently. And it's also a film-makers' industry there. I love following the vision of a film-maker.'
Even a film-maker as idiosyncratic as Cronenberg. In The Shrouds Kruger plays the deceased wife of a wealthy entrepreneur who is so overcome with grief he installs her in a hi-tech cemetery that allows him to watch her decay via his smartphone. Leaving aside the necrophiliac implications, it's a very personal film for the director who lost his own wife to cancer in 2017 and Kruger fears it might also be his last.
She agrees there is no longer room in Hollywood for visionaries, although Cronenberg has produced most of his work independently. 'Mainstream Hollywood is basically now Marvel comics, and it remains to be seen where the rest of us who don't fit into the 18-35 age group will find ourselves,' she says. 'I don't know how much Hollywood thinks this is a problem, but at the Oscars the nominated films were mostly original movies that were not made in Hollywood. The studios no longer want to take a risk. They want to see a film first before they acquire it.'
It's fair to say the industry has never known quite what to do with Kruger. Her mixed cultural identity is part of it – she says Tarantino almost didn't cast her in Inglorious Basterds, because he couldn't believe she was German. 'I've even had people go: 'We can't hire her because she doesn't speak English'.'
All the same, her German identity is becoming increasingly important to her in her work – later this year she stars in Amrum, a Second World War film by the German In The Fade director Fatih Akin. That earlier production was partly about Neo-Nazi terrorists, while she and Akin have hopes to develop a biopic of Marlene Dietrich. She also stars in the forthcoming Each of Us, about the all-women concentration camp at Ravensbruck. 'When I was younger I turned down films set in the war which involved a Nazi or an SS because I've always felt as a German that we've seen so many movies about this. I was never sure what I could bring to the table. But I do find myself looking back more. So many people today have no idea who Marlene Dietrich is. And of course, Neo-Nazism is no longer just a German story.'
She's busier than ever. 'I've found that with age comes greater energy. I don't have time to dilly-dally.' And of course, the world is changing. 'It seems like it's a different day for female actresses. There are more opportunities. Although I'd quite like a part next that I actually look good in.'