When Franz Rogowski tries to pinpoint the moment he went from being a struggling unknown to an in-demand art house star — the 37-year-old German actor is still basking in critical acclaim for his performances in Ira Sachs’ Passages alongside Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos, as well
as Giacomo Abbruzzese’s Berlin festival sleeper Disco Boy and will be walking the Lido red carpet with Giorgio Diritti’s Venice competition title Lubo — he goes back to Berlin 2018.
“That was the year I had a double pack: Two films in competition, with [Christian Petzold’s] Transit and [Thomas Stuber’s] In the Aisles,” says Rogowski, speaking to The Hollywood Reporter via a shaky Zoom connection from France, where he’s spending a few days after wrapping his latest, Bird from We Need to Talk About Kevin director Andrea Arnold.
“I was also one of the European Shooting Stars that year. So it was a bit of a turning point.”
Rogowski had been building a reputation in Germany for a few years before that point. He made his feature debut in Jakob Lass’ 2013 mumblecore drama Love Steaks, charming as an inarticulate masseur at a German luxury hotel. He shone in Sebastian Schipper’s one-shot thriller Victoria in 2015 as a nearly mute ex-con with a penchant for extreme violence. And he played Isabelle Huppert’s angry, drunken son in Michael Haneke’s Happy End in 2017, despite not speaking a word of French (he did his performance in German, with dialog dubbed in later, in post).
But it was 2018 that introduced the art house world to Franz Rogowski: Romantic lead. In Transit, he plays a man trying to escape occupied France who falls in love with the wife of the man whose identity he has stolen to wrangle a visa out. The chemistry between Rogowski and the female lead, Paula Beer, was so obvious that Petzold cast the pair as a mythical star-crossed couple in 2020’s Undine. In Stuber’s In the Aisles, Rogowski plays a man with a dark past who finds the promise of romance in the most unlikely place: Between the shelves of a mega-market, where he works the forklift and flirts with the woman in charge of the candy corner (played by Sandra Hüller).
Both films were critical hits, and Rogowski started getting noticed (it may have helped that it was also the year THR named him the Next Big Thing out of Germany.)
“That was the first time I had to do real press for a festival, where I got a feeling for what it was like to promote a film, to do interviews, to walk the red carpet in a nice suit,” he says. “You know, trying to always find something clever to say, which really isn’t my strong suit.”
He seems to be getting the hang of it. With Passages, Rogowski has (almost) gone mainstream. He’s the center of Sachs’ menage-a-trois drama, playing the charming, but chaotic and destructive Tomas, a German filmmaker living in Paris with his husband Martin (Ben Whishaw) who begins an affair with a young French woman, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), triggering a crisis.
“Ira called me and said he had a script for me, that he had written the part with me in mind, which was a great honor,” he recalls. “And then he said he didn’t want to rehearse too much beforehand because he wanted me to be myself in the role. But my character is sort of a selfish asshole. So I thought: ‘Is this what Ira Sachs thinks of me’?”
Rogowski took the role, regardless, and says he feels “more attached to Thomas than I’d like to admit…All the characters in the film are seeking closeness and connection, seeking relationships. But Thomas doesn’t even have a relationship with himself. So it’s very difficult for him to have a relationship with another person, male or female.”
Passages has drawn attention, in some quarters, for its explicit, and very steamy, sex scenes, including two separate extended encounters between Rogowski and Exarchopoulos and Rogowski and Whishaw, the latter done in an extended single shot that manages to by turns to be both erotic and raunchy as well as emotionally fraught and tender.
“The scene [with Whishaw] in a way was very complicated, technically, but in another way very simple,” says Rogowski. “It was a bit like having real sex with someone you don’t know. You don’t know how it will be. Even if you don’t work in this very specific profession of actor, this kind of high intimacy can happen to anyone: It can be overwhelming, but, if it goes well, you end up in bed with someone you can trust and like. So, in one sense, our sex wasn’t real, because we didn’t engage in penetration, but it was real in terms of the excitement before an unknown intimacy, which then happened. I have to admit I was a bit surprised by how much controversy the sex scenes generated. I don’t watch that many films but for me, the sex in this film functions more like music. It’s part of the psychological drama of the love story. At a point the words stop and the bodies continue to tell the story.”
A former dancer, Rogowski is accustomed to letting his body do the talking for him. But he’s becoming more comfortable with words as well. For Lubo, which premieres in Venice, he had to learn lines in three languages: Swiss German, Italian and Yenish, an almost extinct language spoken by just a few tens of thousands, the majority of whom live in the Swiss Alpine region. In Giorgio Diritti’s 1939-set drama, he plays Lubo Moser, a Yenish nomadic street artist who is called up for military service in the Swiss army to protect the border. While on duty he learns the police have taken his children to be “re-educated,” as part of a national program of eugenics to “cleanse” the country of the Yenish culture. Lubo vows revenge.
“When I read the screenplay I thought the story was so grand and violent and had so many different shades I thought it be incredible if I could manage to make it,” says Rogowski. “It’s a terrible story and an almost forgotten one, at least in the collective consciousness. The government separated the Yenish people. The women were sent to the hospital to be forcibly sterilized and the children were taken to children’s homes and either left there or sold to farming families or childless couples to be raised outside their tradition. I think Switzerland tends to think of itself as very correct, one of the ‘good’ nations, and in many ways they are. But Switzerland also has its dark chapters.”
The role brought back memories for Rogowski, who spent a year in Italian Switzerland at a clown school. “I had to re-train some of my juggling skills but I could still manage a bit of Italian, and Swiss German,” he say, “though for the Yenish, I had to learn it phonetically, like abstract music. But we shot in the same area where I went to clown school. And I remembered my first-ever film festival, which was in Locarno, maybe 19, 20 years ago.”
Then still a struggling clown-to-be, Rogowski developed a routine with a fellow classmate to perform for the Locarno crowds.
“I was a juggler and he was a street clown. In the routine he’d go in front of a coffee shop and try to entertain everyone, then I’d come in, as a competitor and we’d start this big clown fight, about who had the best jokes, who was the best juggler,” he recalls. “In the end, we become good friends and do partner acrobatics together. That was my first festival, collecting coins from tourists. 15 years later, I had my first film at Locarno, as a grown-up, professional actor.”
While he now knows the film promotion routine — how to find clever things to say to nosy journalists — he admits feeling odd to be working amid the ongoing US actors strike. (Rogowski is not a member of SAG-AFTRA and has never worked in the US.)
“It’s a strange situation because this strike is very important this situation, where these major streamers have forced through these aggressive contracts, is happening not only in America but also in Europe, where people also find themselves in poorly paid commitments for years,” he says. “So the strike is essential, but what shouldn’t be forgotten is that there’s also a European market that exists independently of all these. And asking European filmmakers that are not a part of the streamers or studios or the union to not support their own films just wouldn’t be in anyone’s interest.”
Despite his recent success — “at 37, I feel like I’ve finally found something that works” —Rogowski admits he still feels “imposter syndrome” the first day of every new shoot.
“Every new role, every new film, I arrive and don’t know if I’ll be able to do it, if the role will turn out,” he says. “But the nice thing, what I’ve learned, is that everyone, even the very famous people on set, are all the same in that regard. No one has a magic trick, we’re all just making it up as we go, trying to find something together.”
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