His star quality, the raw energy he brings to every performance and a decade of awed reviews have made Franz Rogowski one of Europe’s most talked-about actors. Every rave notice seems to wonder: how did he do that?
He was named a European Shooting Star at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival and has wowed audiences with his wild karaoke performance in Michael Haneke’s Happy End and in a heartbreaking turn as one of the hundreds of gay men who were transferred from Nazi concentration camps to postwar West German prisons in Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom. He already has American admirers, including Barack Obama: the former president shortlisted the second World War film Transit as one of his movies of 2019.
And now Rogowski could be about to win over the rest of the Anglosphere.
Ira Sach’s Passages marks Rogowski’s first big English-language performance, and it’s a predictably outstanding turn. A messy-relationship dramedy set in Paris, Passages concerns Tomas (Rogowski), a narcissistic film director who embarks on a passionate affair with a young teacher, Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos), much to the chagrin of his domestic partner, Martin (Ben Whishaw). “Why can’t you be happy for me?” the thrillingly horrible Tomas chides in one of many outbursts.
Martin tries to move on with someone else, but Tomas, who turns out to be a bad ex-lover as well as a terrible boyfriend, won’t let him break free, even after he has moved in with the pregnant Agathe.
“I mean, looking at him on the page, I kept wondering how am I going to justify this dude,” says Rogowski, who is as arresting in person as he is on screen, simultaneously cheerful, cerebral and restless. “I thought: This is not possible. But then, when you start creating a relationship with the character, and also with the other actors, you start experiencing moments in his life as he would. And you understand that maybe his capacity to see others and respect others is very diminished by his struggle with himself.
“At the end of the day, what he wants is to be wanted, to be loved, to be seen, to create. So he’s not that different from the other characters. Once I understood that it was much easier to enjoy those things and the awkwardness around him. And the trials he inflicts on his partners.”
You have to invite people into this drama and make them curious, but with almost repulsive behaviour
Sachs, who wrote the screenplay with Mauricio Zacharias, showed Rogowski James Cagney gangster movies from the 1940s to provide a touchstone for charming psychopathy.
“Ira wanted references that wouldn’t necessarily help you understand your own morals,” says the actor. “As an audience we like to get lost in a story. But then, somehow, the hero will save us. He’ll lead us back to society and morality. Creating a lead character that is somewhat irritating and not necessarily a role model made us work. Because you have to invite people into this drama and make them curious, but with almost repulsive behaviour.”
Other than Barbenheimer, Passages has become the most talked-about film release of the year, in no small part because of the prohibitive NC-17 rating it has been given in the United States. (It has a more reasonable 16 certificate in Ireland.) Critics have accused the American Motion Picture Association of pearl-clutching and right-wing moral panic. Ira Sachs has railed against the NC-17 designation, calling it a form of cultural censorship.
“Skin is part of what cinema can offer in a way that creates a kind of horny environment for the audience and the actors,” the director told Rolling Stone magazine this month. “Why does our progressive industry accept the MPAA?”
By being intimate and open with one another off camera, we were able to create it in front of the camera
For Rogowski, the erotic sequences were simply part of the job.
“We didn’t have an intimacy co-ordinator,” he says. “There would have been the option to have one. But we decided to build this thing together and trust one another. The question of intimacy is very important, and it’s good we have coaches nowadays. But the difficult thing about intimacy is that you can’t really create it on purpose; you need to create circumstances and then eventually intimacy might happen.
“That’s not just for the sex scenes. It’s a thing that you need in everything. We didn’t want something superficial. Our approach to intimacy was to communicate with one another, have lustful disagreements and little arguments, to watch the material, to make little improvs. And I guess, by being intimate and open with one another off camera, we were able to create it in front of the camera.”
Rogowski was born in 1986 in southwest Germany. At school he was bullied for his lisp, a speech impediment partly caused by surgery for a cleft palate, and was easily distracted. After many clashes with his doctor father and midwife mother, he left the family home in Freiburg im Breisgau, in the Black Forest, and moved in with a friend.
“I made an agreement that my parents would cover expenses but I would have to see a social worker once a week to come up with an idea of what I wanted to do,” he says. “My marks were really bad. I was stoned every evening. I was a heavily depressed teenager trying to overcome my own parents and formulate my own ideas. And I had none.
“The artistic initiation was just me thinking, Okay: sport, art and ethics – which is kind of a philosophy class in German high school – these are the only things I can effortlessly relate to and contribute to. So maybe acting might be a physical way of dealing with human questions. That’s not necessarily true, I learned. But it helped.”
Rogowski studied physical theatre and contemporary dance and appeared on stages from Berlin to Zagreb before finding international success as the strangely charismatic thug who teams up with the heroine of Sebastian Schipper’s one-take crime drama Victoria. He has subsequently worked with such cinematic greats as Michael Haneke, Christian Petzold and Terence Malick.
Petzold, who directed Rogowski in Transit and the mermaid mystery Undine, compares the actor to Peter Lorre and the great stars of the silent era. Rogowski is a significant figure in the landscape of German cinema, he says.
“The German bourgeoisie built theatres because this is our parliament; theatre is the parliament of lost revolutions,” says the film-maker. “So we have the best theatre and acting schools. But that can be a problem for film. Because everything is theatre and dialogue, and cinema is about the physical body. Franz didn’t go to acting school. He was with the circus and clowns. Rehearsing with him is a totally new experience. He doesn’t rehearse a part. He dances it.”
I like film-makers that stand for something and have a unique perspective. They are willing to sacrifice certain things in order to keep that sacred space
“I worked as a dancer for eight years,” says Rogowski. “As a choreographer and as a performer. We have a state-funded theatre in Hamburg. But I was also travelling and working in Brussels. I never did Hamlet. I never did King Lear. I did weird pieces with projections and elliptic dramaturgy where I would shake and shiver on the floor and then turn into architecture or sculptures or foreign bodies. I could have developed my career as a choreographer – I was a choreographer – but I never really found my own voice as a choreographer. I was the guy in the background that nobody cared about.”
He is currently shooting Andrea Arnold’s Bird alongside Barry Keoghan, who turned down Gladiator 2 to take the role.
“That’s what I’m interested in,” says Rogowski. “I like film-makers that stand for something and have a unique perspective. They are willing to sacrifice certain things in order to keep that sacred space. They’re doing something artistic and meaningful. It’s not about shareholders. It’s about something cultural that keeps us together as human beings.
“The more those values are eroded or lost, the more I feel the need to look for those people and to work with them. I’ve been very fortunate to find them. If you don’t write the movie yourself, it’s not likely that you care about the movie. I’m making a movie with Andrea Arnold, an incredible author and film-maker with a very subjective, intimate way of sharing her existence.”
He smiles. “Lucky me.”
Passages is in cinemas from Friday, September 1st
