Too beautiful’… ‘ex-fashion model’… Will perennially underrated Diane Kruger finally throw off such disparaging tags with her new film, The Infiltrator?
Some reviews stick around and Diane Kruger had the misfortune to receive a memorably withering one when she was starting out as an actress. “Too beautiful to play a role of any substance,” was the offhand dismissal from the New York Times critic, Manohla Dargis, in 2006. The comment was mostly a judgment on Troy, the eye-wateringly expensive Iliad adaptation in which she was cast opposite Brad Pitt and Orlando Bloom as a blond, blue-eyed Helen. The film-makers wanted an unknown for the part and Kruger, a German ex-model, beat more than 3,000 women to be the face that, in Christopher Marlowe’s words, “launch’d a thousand ships”.
Ten years – and around 30 films – on, the New York Times line still irks Kruger. “What an ignorant and stupid thing to say!” she exclaims, on the phone from Paris; she splits her time between there and New York. “But it really affected me at the time because I thought, ‘Why is she talking about the way I look? Why isn’t she talking about what I do in the movie?’ And so that really taught me to a) not read critics. And b) to just toughen up. So I was like, ‘Fuck that!’ Or, ‘Fuck them!’ It made me really want to just dig deeper and show them I could do other things.”
Kruger, now 40, has made a committed effort to change the public perception of her – and the project continues. She is perhaps best known here and in the States for playing kick-ass double agent Bridget von Hammersmark in Quentin Tarantino’s second world war epic Inglourious Basterds or as Sonya Cross, a detective with Asperger’s syndrome, in the American version of the Scandi thriller The Bridge. But mostly she works in France, leaning towards parts for strong women in darker, independent films, some of which she produces. She’s been Marie Antoinette (Farewell, My Queen), Abraham Lincoln’s stepmother (The Better Angels) and a Bosnian immigrant taxi driver (Unknown). Kruger is in demand on magazine covers and never seems to make a misstep on the red carpet, but it’s clear that’s not where her heart lies.
And Kruger’s new movie, The Infiltrator, continues to make her case. It tells the true story of a customs official in 1980s Florida called Robert Mazur (played by Breaking Bad’s Bryan Cranston) who went undercover to bring down a Colombian drug cartel and the banks that supported it. Kruger is a rookie special agent, Kathy Ertz, who comes in on the sting as Mazur’s wife. It is a superior thriller, tense and twisty, and Cranston is predictably excellent, but Kruger is sharp and spirited, more than holding her own in a role that could easily have just been arm candy.
Kruger, it turns out, is not what you would expect in a few ways. Her perfect, accentless English is more sweary than you might imagine and her co-stars are often surprised she is an excellent joke teller. She’s winningly honest about her career and personal life. And it’s hard not to warm to someone who, when I ask why she gave up modelling, says: “The third time the 1960s came around I was like, ‘Are we really taking this picture again? I’m really, really bored.’”
Before modelling, there was ballet. Kruger grew up as Diane Heidkrüger, in a village in the heart of Germany, not far from Hanover. Each summer from the age of 11, she was shipped off to London on her own for intensive training with the Royal Ballet School. It sounds quite full-on, Black Swan-esque, but Kruger has fond memories of those trips: “My home was a little chaotic and I always loved getting away,” she recalls. Her father was an alcoholic and frequently absent; her parents went through a messy divorce when she was 13.
A knee injury around this time derailed her ballet aspirations, but, from puberty onwards, Kruger had already secretly feared the worst. “I don’t think I had the talent to be a prima ballerina,” she admits. “I was really depressed for a good year, but now I’m older, [I see] it was a really great life lesson: you don’t always get what you want. And I think it actually led me, through very mysterious ways, to acting. Because I had such a tumultuous childhood, I was able to express my emotions dancing or being on stage. It’s so much about getting it out and putting that passion or frustration into your performance and then being rewarded for that.”
Kruger started to model, aged 15, after being chosen to represent Germany in the Elite Model Look competition that has also launched the careers of Cindy Crawford and Gisele Bündchen. When it was suggested that she move to Paris, no one was more dubious than her family. “I did not grow up in a household where that was even a subject or encouraged,” says Kruger. “My mother was very much into making sure that I did OK in school because she wanted me not to be dependent on a man, because her life had been turned upside down. She was very loving but very strict and, if anything, she was incredibly disappointed when I chose to do modelling. She was like, ‘Why would you do that? You don’t look like a model.’”
Kruger laughs. “Not that she was condescending and not encouraging, but she was like, ‘You’re crazy!’ basically. Again, now I’m older – and I could have a daughter the age I was when I left home – I can only admire her faith in me, because there’s no way I’d let my 16-year-old daughter go to Paris for a year.”
The jump to acting in her mid-20s was, again, partly personal choice and partly Kruger’s hard-headed realism. Although she booked covers for Paris Vogue and featured in ads for Chanel and Giorgio Armani, she often felt like the swan whose legs whir incessantly to stay afloat. “I really don’t look like a model,” she insists. “I’m only 5ft 7in; I’m not like your 5ft 10in obvious model strutting down the street, so I always felt insecure about how I looked and I put so much pressure on myself. The minute I decided, ‘Why am I doing this to myself?’ my life got a lot better.”
The role of Helen in Troy, which Kruger won almost immediately after the switch, was, she says now, a mixed blessing. “It was hugely daunting, because I knew they didn’t necessarily hire me because I was Julia Roberts,” she says. “But it was the biggest thing to get at that time in Hollywood. I’d never even been to Hollywood, it allowed me to get an agent. I went from doing literally one movie to being known, or my face at least, throughout the world.”
Kruger has become more circumspect about the parts she takes, especially in American films. For The Infiltrator, the draw first and foremost was Cranston. “I was fan-girling a lot, just because of the show,” she says, meaning Breaking Bad. “It’s an embarrassing thing to say, but you’d be hard pressed to find any actor in Los Angeles, or even in England, who wouldn’t want to work with Bryan Cranston. He’s a character actor who became a movie star and that doesn’t happen very often. You forget who he is, his face just changes. In fact, so much so, I ran into him in the Vanity Fair party, after we wrapped The Infiltrator, and I walked past him without recognising him. Definitely one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with – ever.”
The Infiltrator has had a decidedly odd journey to the cinema. The director is Brad Furman (who had success with The Lincoln Lawyer) and the screenplay – in a possible movie-history first – is by his mother, Ellen Brown Furman, a former lawyer who has turned to writing in her 60s. “That was an interesting dynamic to say the least, but I kind of loved it,” says Kruger. “Brad is such a good and nice Jewish boy who adores his mom.” Meanwhile, despite the story playing out in tropical Florida, the film, for budgetary reasons, was mostly shot in the UK in rainy, cold springtime. Locations included a bowling alley next to Heathrow and Dunsfold Aerodrome, home of the Top Gear racetrack. Did Kruger see the Stig? “No, what is that?” she replies.
Kruger turned 40 in July, but celebrations were rather muted. Shortly after the big day, it was officially announced that she and Joshua Jackson (Pacey from Dawson’s Creek) were splitting after more than 10 years together. “It wasn’t the most fun time; my partner and I separated so it was a transitional time in my life,” she says with a wry snort. “But a very positive one.”
Was there a sense that, as a new decade loomed, Kruger found herself assessing her personal and professional happiness? “You know, if you’d have asked me that a year ago, I’d have said absolutely not, it doesn’t matter,” she replies. “And it kind of didn’t. And it kind of doesn’t. But there is a sense that I don’t have any time to waste. Like, I want to do what I want to do or I want to be with who I want to be with. I’ve got to put myself first, no more excuses. I’m going to live in the now.”
Career-wise, at least, Kruger is on a hot streak. And as she talks you sense that she is almost relieved to be entering a phase of her life where her looks will be less commented on. “Around 70% of my career is in France, which is an amazing place for women who are getting older,” she says. “I’m not daunted. I feel and I truly believe that the best is yet to come. I have felt better this year about where I am in life and who I am as a person than I have in the past 10 years.”
Next up, Kruger plays Catherine Deneuve’s daughter in Tout nous sépare: “It’s a really fucked-up movie and I loved every second of it.” But the one she’s really excited about is the new project from Fatih Akin, a German director of Turkish descent whose films, notably Head-On and The Edge of Heaven, often focus on the identity problems of immigrants. Kruger collared Akin at the 2012 Cannes festival, where she was a judge, and the new movie, In the Fade, which starts shooting this autumn, was written with her in mind.
“I don’t want to give too much away, but my character is very far from what people physically think of who I am,” she says. “It’s a transformation and I’ve never been more scared about a film than this! Like truly scared. For the last month or so, I’ve dreamed about it every night. I can’t wait to get started, but I’m dreading the emotional toll of it.
“I’m really scared!” she repeats, but she’s giggling too. Perhaps, after this, no one will dismiss her as just a pretty face any more.
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