Daniel Brühl interview: ‘War is not an adventure – the supposed winners are going to suffer for the rest of their lives’

The star of ‘Rush’ and ‘Inglourious Basterds’ plays a peace-seeking politician in Netflix’s ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. He talks to Annabel Nugent about its prescient themes, why men have an advantage as they get older, and wanting to be in The Stone Roses

‘I have to say I was getting a bit tired of playing the good guy all the time,’ says Daniel Brühl (Shutterstock)

Daniel Brühl will always stop for a photo with a fan. What he is recognised for largely depends on where in the world he is at the time. If he is in Italy, chances are people know him for playing Formula One ace Niki Lauda in Rush. In Germany, he is still approached by admirers of his early indie drama Good Bye Lenin! and outside Europe it will almost always be for Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Whichever role it is, the 44-year-old Brühl is happy to oblige. Other actors ask how he remains so patient. “I’ve always had this urge to be liked,” he confesses bashfully. “Even up until now.”

It’s funny because over the past two decades, the Spanish-German actor has cultivated a reputation for the opposite. On screen, he is often found scowling, if not moustache-twirling. First, there was his star-making turn as Tarantino’s unctuous, lovelorn Nazi, Fredrick Zoller. (Incidentally, Brühl has been cast as a Nazi or Nazi adjacent in at least five films.) Even as Lauda in Rush, Brühl played the racing driver as curt and superior: the antithesis of Chris Hemsworth’s freewheeling sweet-talker James Hunt. You could say a Marvel supervillain – such as the one he plays in Captain America: Civil War – was always on the cards for Brühl. He is very good at being bad.

His latest film, the newly released Netflix adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 novel All Quiet on the Western Front (in German: Im Westen Nichts Neues, or Nothing New in the West), is something of a switch-up. The book and its film version depict the horror of war as a young German soldier sees it. Newcomer Felix Kammerer plays the young trooper. Brühl is the real-life liberal politician Matthias Erzberger, who in 1918 persuaded the German higher-ups to finally admit defeat and negotiate a ceasefire with the French. Less than three years later, he was assassinated by right-wing nationalists.

All Quiet on the Western Front paints a realistically bloody picture of warfare. There is not a whiff of heroism to be found in the trenches, as some war movies that Brühl grew up watching suggested. “To have a very bleak and neutral point of view was paramount,” he says. Valour was out of the question in German films about war. “We cannot take the position, in telling a story like this, of heroism or glorification.” While the book has received multiple adaptations since 1918, including the 1930 Oscar-winning film by Lewis Milestone, this is the first time it has been shot in German. Asked why it has taken so long, Brühl considers the question carefully, “Maybe because we have restraints and fears in dealing with our own history.”

There is nothing glorious about war. The film is very clear about that. Its message is universal and timeless. Right now, Brühl adds, it is also scarily pertinent. “I wish that we were in a situation in which the film was less relevant. When we started, there was a rise in nationalism, populism everywhere so that was enough reason to tell this story but what we could not foresee is that war would erupt in the middle of Europe.” Brühl hopes that young people especially will go to see the film. “I want to remind the people and the youth that war is not cool. War is not an adventure; war is horror – and the supposed winners are going to suffer for the rest of their lives.”

Conversation with Brühl roams freely. He is erudite and engaged, almost always leaning forward in his chair, elbows on his knees. The actor may be in his mid-forties but could pass for much younger. The stylish suit he is wearing no doubt helps: Brühl looks at home in this five-star hotel room dressed in a slick navy corduroy number with a black turtleneck underneath. But mostly it is down to his face, which is youthful even in middle age. Brühl’s grin is by far his most distinctive feature. In fact, it is hardly a grin at all, only the slightest upturn of his lips. The minute movement gives his smile an impish quality that can appear sinister, like when it flickers across the face of Lutz Heck, the cajoling Nazi zoologist Brühl plays opposite Jessica Chastain in The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017). Today, it is only ever shown in good humour.

For a long time, Brühl resented his boyish mien. “From my late twenties up until 35, whenever I shaved, I’d think, ‘S***, I look like a 15-year-old!’” He was often offered parts 10 years younger than his real age. “I thought, I’ve gone through this. It doesn’t interest me any more! But nobody would believe that I’m a father or a teacher.” It is, of course, ironic that he now misses those days. “Now when I say to my wife I look 15 when I shave, she says, ‘You wish!’” We compare it to getting ID’d when buying alcohol. What was once an inconvenience has become a flattery of the highest order. “Just now I was renewing my credit card and had to scroll for so long before I found my birth year,” Brühl laughs, rolling his r’s to mimic the sound of his computer’s mouse.

Marvel helps keep him young. “My nephew is 19 years old and finally now he takes me seriously.” Brühl first entered the MCU in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War as the ski-masked Baron Helmut Zemo, a role he reprised in the Disney Plus series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. While other actors such as Elizabeth Olsen and Christian Bale have been lightly critical of green-screen acting, Brühl speaks about it with wonder. “It’s the most mind-boggling experience when you see the result and it’s actually believable.” He recalls one of the first scenes he shot for Marvel. He was in Atlanta where it was 40-plus degrees Celsius. It was supposed to be Siberia, 40 minus. “I was in a North Face jacket, and I was just dying. And the wonderful Chadwick [Boseman] was so brilliant, sweating in his full Black Panther gear. I was talking in that East European accent; Chadwick was speaking in an African accent, and we were both imagining some isolated snowy valley. It all felt so incredibly weird – but it worked!” Marvel has been welcoming of both Brühl and perhaps more surprisingly his ideas. “It’s like going to a Luna park. It’s a massive playground and they invite you to explore things. You’re not in a corset where they tell you what to do.” Brühl wanted to imbue his character with some humour for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier; “They said bring it on.”

Daniel Brühl as Matthias Erzberger in the Netflix adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1928 novel ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (Reiner Bajo)

It wasn’t until Brühl, then 31, was cast in Tarantino’s 2009 revenge film Inglourious Basterds that he became an international star. Famously, Tarantino offered him the part after watching Good Bye Lenin! – the 2003 film that made Brühl a name to know in Germany. The big-hearted comedy drama starred Brühl as Alex, a doting son whose mother wakes up from a coma right after the fall of the Berlin Wall. When doctors inform him that any jarring event may give her a heart attack, Alex works tirelessly to conjure a world in which the revolution never happened. Good Bye Lenin! was a brilliant but limiting showcase for Brühl. He was, at least according to scripts he was sent, always going to play the perfect son, the guy who helps elderly people across the street and waters your plants when you’re away. Brühl was doomed to play the nice guy forever – and then came Tarantino. “It was refreshing to have that outside perspective, because I have to say I was getting a bit tired of playing the good guy all the time.”

The happily violent, history-inspired, cinema-centric Inglourious Basterds was classic Tarantino. As Zoller, Brühl was a Nazi soldier unwittingly wooing the woman plotting his grisly demise and that of his fascist regime. It’s a coup of casting. In the role, Brühl visibly toys with his boy-next-door image and proves that sweetness is sometimes best when it belies something sour. Brühl finally sloughed off the nice guy veneer. “I thought, how brilliant of Tarantino to play with that image of me as a nice guy, and the timing of it coincided with my need to break out of that,” he recalls. “And it would have been very limiting to stay in Germany and work out of Germany. It had become a bit boring.”

Quentin Tarantino cast Daniel Brühl against type in 2009’s ‘Inglourious Basterds’ (Universal/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Tarantino or no Tarantino, it’s unlikely Brühl would have stayed in Germany. He was born in Barcelona to a Spanish mother and a German father but raised in Cologne. He spent summers in France with his cousins. It makes sense then that his first point of entry into a role is language. “For me, it all starts with the voice.” Accent, intonation, register provide an appealing and useful foothold into a character’s social and psychological universe – one easily grasped by a polyglot such as Brühl who is fluent in Spanish, German, French, English and Portuguese. He has also been entirely convincing as a Polish stranger (Ladies in Lavender). Personally, he has always loved the English language. As a teen he used to sing in two “very horrible” bands. He corrects himself. “The bands weren’t horrible. I was horrible. I always tried to sound very British because I wanted to be like the Manchester bands of the time, like The Stone Roses.” He cringes and shudders in his seat, as if trying to shake off the memory itself. “Eurgh – Gott! Anyway, it became clear very quickly that I wouldn’t have a career as a rock star.”

If my father had been a butcher, then probably I wouldn’t be sitting here

Language still interested him, even if a future in British indie music was off the table. “I find it so interesting how you can express certain things better in one language or the other. It’s the first thing I hold on to as an actor. In most cases, I want to know how someone speaks and then I find the rest of it.” You can find Brühl talking to himself a lot during pre-production. He is nervous about the release of All Quiet on the Western Front; his character is from the same region as his in-laws and his accent is sure to attract some friendly flak. “I’m going to get some text about it from them,” he rolls his eyes. “But I tried my best. Phonetically, it’s really difficult.”

Brühl seems almost to have been predestined for life in the arts. He credits his family for his current profession, reeling off relatives and their various occupations. His father was Hanno Brühl, a documentary filmmaker who also dabbled in theatre and directed some TV movies. His uncle worked in radio. His other uncle was a journalist. His cousin was a theatre and opera director. His other cousin also worked in radio. “If my father had been a butcher, then probably I wouldn’t be sitting here,” Brühl says matter-of-factly.

Daniel Brühl at 25 years old in ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ (2003) (Conny Klein/Wdr/X-Filme/Kobal/Shutterstock)

But there’s another reason he is an actor. It’s the same reason that he will always stop for a photo with a fan. “As a little boy in kindergarten, I learned very quickly to ask myself: ‘What is my position here? How can I position myself?’” Most archetypes were out of reach for him. Young Daniel wasn’t good enough at sport to be a jock but he did have something else to offer. “I soon realised that I’m a bit funny and I’m a good storyteller, so I got attention, and I got respect and I got my circle of friends through that.” His peripatetic upbringing and even his current life travelling to and from movie sets preclude him from a feeling of belonging. “It would be very coquettish and wrong to say it was a disadvantage growing up in a family that was so mixed up,” he clarifies. “The only negative effect is that very often I have the impression I’m not from any one place.” Even in Cologne, where he grew up, the locals will look at him like a traitor. Brühl puts on an accent to mimic them: “You went to the capital like so many others. Don’t pretend you are from here.” He sighs.

That unenviable need to be liked is what it comes down to then. “I guess that’s still such a motor for me. When you’re an actor, you have that stage and you enjoy when you tell a joke or play a part that reaches people, that makes them curious and makes them listen to what you have to say,” he pauses. “I think this started with being a child and desperately trying to get some attention.”

‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ is available to watch on Netflix on 28 October