Jeanne Goursaud, the actress who left German TV’s fairy tales to carry a Netflix hit

Jeanne Goursaud

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 4, 1996 Pinneberg, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Exterritorial, The 15:17 to Paris, The Magic Flute

For most of Exterritorial, Jeanne Goursaud is alone on screen. Her character, a former special forces soldier, tears through a United States consulate in Frankfurt looking for a small boy whom the staff swear never came in with her, while everyone around her, her own mother included, starts treating her as the problem. The film became one of the most-watched non-English titles Netflix has released, and it put a German-French actress who had spent a decade in supporting parts at the centre of a global hit. Whether she could carry a film is settled. What kind of film the industry will now hand her is not.

Her reply this autumn has been to refuse a single lane. Within a few days of each other she has turned up as a single mother whose son’s birthday party collapses in the Netflix comedy Das Geschenk, as a firefighter racing the clock in front of a sealed safe in the cinema thriller Unsafe, and in a supporting part in a public-television drama about the investigation behind the attack on Berlin’s Christmas market. The run is a statement about range from an actress the German press has spent years describing mostly by her looks.

Goursaud was born on 4 April 1996 in Pinneberg, north of Hamburg, to a German mother and a French father, and grew up in nearby Halstenbek, where she and her sister put on plays in the family yard. She trained for eight years at TASK, a Hamburg drama school for children and teenagers, and later studied with the acting coach Ivana Chubbuck. She grew up speaking German and French and works fluently in English too, a combination that later opened doors in three industries. At sixteen she was the face of a Johnson & Johnson skincare brand, and the same year she made her screen debut with guest parts in the children’s crime series Die Pfefferkörner and the rural comedy Neues aus Büttenwarder.

The apprenticeship that followed was long and very German. A recurring role as Emma in the German-Australian children’s series In Your Dreams gave her a first job in English. From 2017 she played the student Bibi in the RTL school comedy Der Lehrer, joined Michael Herbig as Babsirella in the parody Bullyparade: The Movie and appeared in the Grimme Prize-winning mystery web series Wishlist. Public broadcasters cast her as a princess in Der Schweinehirt and as Snow-White in Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot, their Christmas fairy-tale films. While living in Paris to polish her French she was picked by Clint Eastwood for a small part in The 15:17 to Paris.

The turn came with Barbarians in 2020. Netflix’s war drama about the Germanic tribes under Roman occupation cast her as Thusnelda, the Cheruscan noblewoman whose loyalties drive the revolt led by Laurence Rupp’s Arminius. The series reached more than 37 million households in its first four weeks and ran for two seasons, and Goursaud later described a shoot spent in mud and cold. It also fixed the image the German press would attach to her: one public broadcaster headlined a profile with the words “beautiful Thusnelda”, while a Stuttgart newspaper turned her Thusnelda into a Germanic Greta Thunberg.

She spent the next four years working across borders rather than climbing the domestic ladder. She played Jazz in the Warner TV drama Para – We Are King and Jenny Krause opposite Harry Treadaway in The Chemistry of Death, the Paramount+ adaptation of Simon Beckett’s crime novel, and appeared in flashbacks as Lena in the Netflix thriller Dear Child. In French she became Alice Vidal, one of the police officers in Olivier Marchal’s Marseille series Pax Massilia, and in 2025 she played Vera in Kabul, a European co-production about the evacuation of the Afghan capital in August 2021. In 2024 she was admitted to the European Film Academy.

Exterritorial, written and directed by Christian Zübert and released on Netflix on 30 April 2025, changed the scale. Her Sara Wulf, a veteran of Afghanistan doubted by everyone, fights her way through the building and through a cover-up involving Dougray Scott’s security chief. The film logged 38.3 million views in its first week, topped the Netflix film chart in dozens of countries and, by Netflix’s own count, passed 87 million views in the first half of 2025 alone; within weeks it had entered the platform’s all-time list of most-watched non-English films.

The reception at home was split in a revealing way. German critics were divided on the film itself: one reviewer gave it four out of ten for a story that grew sillier by the minute, another filed it next to Frantic and Flightplan as a premise seen too many times. The same reviews tended to exempt her. Der Spiegel wrote that she was far ahead of her male colleagues, and the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s critic concluded that what kept viewers watching was its lead actress. A regional paper summed it up as a German film celebrated everywhere except in Germany. The verdict says as much about the place of genre cinema in German film culture as it does about her, and it leaves her with the risk every surprise action star faces: being offered the same consulate siege again in a different building.

The three projects that landed between late October and early November read as a deliberate answer. Breitscheidplatz 19/12, David Nawrath’s six-part series about the Düsseldorf state security investigators caught up in the events that led to the December 2016 attack, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2026 under the title Blindspot Berlin; it went up on the ARD Mediathek on 30 October with Das Erste broadcasting it on 1 and 6 November, with Albrecht Schuch in the lead and Goursaud as Katja Seibert. Das Geschenk, released in English as The Birthday Gift, arrived on Netflix on 30 October: Vanessa Jopp directs a script by Ben Brooks, with Edin Hasanović as her brother and Heiner Lauterbach as their father. Unsafe, directed by Thomas Sieben, casts her as the firefighter Alex Birk, called with her colleague, played by her Barbarians partner Laurence Rupp, to free a six-year-old girl locked inside a 1930s safe in a remote mansion.

Goursaud divides her time between Cologne and Berlin and keeps her private life out of interviews. Unsafe opened in Austrian cinemas on 29 October and reaches German screens on 5 November, a ticketed release that will measure something a streaming chart cannot: whether the audience that found her at home on Netflix will leave the house for her.

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Tags: actors, actresses, German cinema, Jeanne Goursaud, Laurence Rupp, Barbarians

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