Lars Eidinger, Berlin’s Restless Hamlet, Is Superman’s Next Villain

Lars Eidinger

Photo: Elena Ternovaja / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 21, 1976 West Berlin, Germany
Occupation	Actor
Known for	Dumbo, Never Look Away, Persian Lessons
Awards	German Film Critics' · Grimme-Preis · Austrian Film · Bavarian Film · Ernst Lubitsch Prize · Golden Linden · Bambi, Actor National

The Gestapo chief who interrogates Jean Moulin in László Nemes’s Moulin does not need to raise his voice. Lars Eidinger plays Klaus Barbie as a controlled, almost banal functionary, and the film’s Cannes premiere produced the kind of notice actors frame: one German critic called it probably the best Nazi villain since Christoph Waltz’s Hans Landa, while The Playlist, cool on the film, singled out his imposing turn. Next summer the same face will belong to Brainiac, the alien intelligence James Gunn has set against David Corenswet in Man of Tomorrow.

That is a strange place for this particular actor to land. At the Schaubühne in Berlin, Eidinger has spent his career doing things German theatre still argues about: a Hamlet he played hundreds of times, a Richard III that the British critic Lyn Gardner described as a seductive rock star gone to seed. Off stage he DJs through the night and photographs the oddities of ordinary streets. Abroad, though, the parts keep arriving in uniform. The question his career is asking now is whether the international industry that has finally found him wants the actor or the type.

He grew up in Marienfelde, on the southern rim of West Berlin, where he was born on 21 January 1976 to a paediatric nurse and an engineer. As a boy he appeared on Moskito, a youth programme of the West Berlin broadcaster SFB, and at school he acted in Woyzeck. He later said he always wanted to be first and best, and was still the clown who needed the laugh before he could feel happy.

From 1995 to 1999 he trained at the Ernst Busch drama school in Berlin, alongside Nina Hoss, Devid Striesow, Mark Waschke and Fritzi Haberlandt. An audition as Franz Moor in Schiller’s The Robbers won him a place at the Schaubühne, where he joined the ensemble in 2000. At first its artistic director, Thomas Ostermeier, barely used him. Then the parts came: the dying Doctor Rank in Ibsen’s Nora, the anxious scholar Tesman in Hedda Gabler, and in 2008 a breakdancing Hamlet that toured from Avignon to Australia. By 2015 he estimated he had played the Dane some 250 times. He calls it the role of his life.

Cinema arrived late, and through a small door. In Maren Ade’s Everyone Else, he and Birgit Minichmayr played a young couple whose relationship frays on holiday in Italy after an encounter with another, more conventional pair. The film won two Silver Bears at the 2009 Berlinale, and German television began casting him as men with something wrong inside. His Kai Korthals, a postman who stalks women and kills them when they notice him, haunted three episodes of the Kiel Tatort between 2012 and 2021. The drama Grenzgang earned him the Grimme Prize in 2014.

International directors found him through Olivier Assayas, who cast him opposite Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart in Clouds of Sils Maria, then in Personal Shopper and the miniseries Irma Vep. He played Tsar Nicholas II in the Russian period drama Matilda, learning his Russian lines phonetically for a film that became politically explosive in Russia. Claire Denis, Tim Burton and Noah Baumbach followed, with parts in High Life, Dumbo and White Noise. At home he became Alfred Nyssen, the steel heir conspiring against the Weimar Republic across four seasons of Babylon Berlin, and scored his biggest German box-office hit with 25 km/h, a moped road movie opposite Bjarne Mädel.

The pattern is hard to miss. In Vadim Perelman’s Persian Lessons he was Klaus Koch, the SS officer who wants to learn Farsi from a prisoner faking it to survive. In the BBC‘s SS-GB he was an SS colonel in a Nazi-occupied London. In Netflix‘s All the Light We Cannot See, opposite Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie, he was Reinhold von Rumpel, a dying Nazi gemologist hunting a cursed diamond. Seen together, they show an industry that looks at one of Europe’s most volatile stage actors and sees the officer.

Eidinger has not always helped his own case. In 2020 he and the designer Philipp Bree launched a 550-euro cowhide bag modelled on Günter Fruhtrunk’s design for the Aldi plastic carrier, and Eidinger posed with it outside a Berlin homeless shelter. The criticism was fierce; the Düsseldorf street paper fiftyfifty answered with a free bag styled on Lidl’s, handed out to homeless people. He called the campaign a misunderstanding and argued that glossy advertising which hides poverty is far more cynical. The argument misses what upset people. The shelter was not the target of the provocation. It was the backdrop, and the refusal to be embarrassed that makes him electric on stage reads differently when the people in the frame never chose to be there.

His strongest recent screen work came at home. In Matthias Glasner’s Dying he plays Tom Lunies, a conductor rehearsing a friend’s new composition while his parents fall apart, with Corinna Harfouch as his mother. The film premiered in competition at the 2024 Berlinale, where Glasner won the Silver Bear for best screenplay, and took the German Film Award in gold; Eidinger was nominated for best actor and won a Bambi that year. Reiner Holzemer’s documentary Lars Eidinger – Sein oder nicht sein followed him as he prepared Jedermann for the Salzburg Festival, where he played the title role in 2021 and 2022.

After a part in Tom Tykwer’s The Light and a small role in Baumbach’s Jay Kelly, Gunn announced in December 2025 that Eidinger had risen to the top of a worldwide search for Brainiac. He shot the film between April and August 2026, months after turning fifty, and offered the clearest clue to his approach: Brainiac is described as the incarnation of Satan, he told The Hollywood Reporter, and he finds that almost Shakespearean. Early in 2026 he was back at the Schaubühne as Richard III.

This autumn he is everywhere. Since September he has played Zeno, son of a vampire matriarch plotting a seizure of power, in the Disney+ series City of Blood. Volker Schlöndorff’s adaptation of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Heimsuchung, which premiered at Cannes, opens in German cinemas on 15 October. Moulin reaches French screens on 28 October, and the next day Ulrike Ottinger’s The Blood Countess, with Isabelle Huppert as Countess Báthory, reunites him on German screens with Minichmayr. Between shoots he tours Brecht’s Hauspostille poems with the composer Hans-Jörn Brandenburg and still plays DJ nights.

He lives in Charlottenburg with his wife, the opera singer Ulrike Eidinger, and their daughter. His photographs, collected in the book O Mensch, filled a museum show at K21 in Düsseldorf. Man of Tomorrow opens on 9 July 2027, and he has already told Hollywood how he means to play its villain: as Shakespeare.