Largely silent, and now golden

Child actor wins acclaim for work with Tom Hanks

Berlin When director Paul Greengrass was gearing up to make his new film, “News of the World,” about a Civil War veteran in 1870s Texas who escorts an orphaned girl to her relatives across the state, he was anticipating one major challenge.

“This is the first film I made with a child actor at the heart of it,” he said recently by phone.

The casting would be difficult on multiple levels, he realized. Although the character is on-screen for much of the movie, she has only a few lines of dialogue. Tom Hanks had already signed on as the lead, so she would have to go “toe to toe” with a superstar, Greengrass said. “It was a very, very hard ask.”

One of the first children he saw during the casting in 2019, however, was Helena Zengel, a then-11-year-old from Berlin with a tomboyish energy and platinum hair.

“She was the only person I really had to look at,” he said. “It was the easiest decision in the film.”

“News of the World,” which opened Dec. 25 in theaters in the United States and Canada, and will be available on Netflix in other countries from February, is an international breakthrough for Zengel, who has already become one of the most talkedabout actors — let alone child actors — to emerge in Germany in recent years.

She garnered widespread praise last year for her portrayal of a semi-feral 9-year-old in the movie “System Crasher,” which went on to be Germany’s official submission to the Academy Awards. That performance won her best actress this spring at the Lolas, Germany’s equivalent of the Oscars, making her the youngest recipient of that prize.

In “News of the World,” Zengel’s character, Johanna Leonberger, is left orphaned after her German parents are murdered on their farm when she is 4. Taken in and raised by the Kiowa tribe, she is later removed by soldiers, and a traveling veteran, played by Hanks, agrees to bring her to a surviving aunt and uncle.

Zengel has received strong reviews for her performance, with critics praising her ability to imbue her defiant and alienated character with a sense of warmth and intelligence, and for channeling the emotional horrors of Johanna’s back story in near silence. Most of her lines are in Kiowa, a language she had to learn for the part.

Speaking via Zoom recently, Zengel was far gigglier and chattier — which is to say, far more like a regular 12-year-old — than her recent roles might suggest. She said that, like most children in Germany, she had spent most of this year at home, and that she was quarantined because classmates had tested positive for the coronavirus.

Before being cast in the film, she said, she had never heard of Hanks.

“I think I’d seen the ‘Da Vinci Code’ before, but I didn’t know who he was,” she said. “I thought it was just some actor.”

In an email, Hanks praised Zengel’s skill of performing “with no buildup, no apprehension and no self-consciousness,” and said he wished he had “her same ease, her simplicity.”

Zengel said she had never taken an acting class, “because I’m not sure if there was much for me to learn.”

“I stand in front of the camera, I know what I want, and I do it,” she said, matter-of-factly.

This focus and willpower, her mother, Anne Zengel, explained, has been her daughter’s hallmark ever since she was a toddler. Her earliest forays into acting, at age 4, had emerged largely out of parental frustration, she said, because her daughter had “three times as much intensity” as other children and would act out if she was denied something she wanted.

She enrolled Helena in ice-skating classes and encouraged her to try acting. After a few small roles in German TV crime shows, as a bank robber’s daughter or a girl who falls from a bridge, she eventually landed a lead role in a German art-house film, “Dark Blue Girl,” at age 7.

Now Zengel is confronting the strange reality of international fame while being stuck at home, finishing seventh grade. This fall, Variety magazine selected her as one of its “actors to watch,” and she said she had received offers for other roles in recent months, but that she was waiting until the pandemic subsided before making any decisions.

She said that she was open to moving to the United States, although her mother said she was intent on her daughter having a normal childhood, and that she was comforted by Germany’s comparatively lowkey celebrity culture.