Franz Rogowski is ready to soar

Franz Rogowski is not mad, but life as an actor can make him feel like it. “You wander the streets, whispering lines,” says the 38-year-old Berliner. “Trying to imagine scenes in a script that are not yet real. It is like being pregnant with 20 babies.” And the funny thing is, when you finally make the film, so much is random anyway. “A mediocre actor can have wonderful lighting, and it all works out great.”

Rogowski is not a mediocre actor. In fact, with his mournful eyes and a scar from a childhood cleft lip, he is among the most gifted performers in modern cinema. His talent was identified early in films by master auteurs Terrence Malick (A Hidden Life) and Michael Haneke (Happy End). Later came Passages, last year’s breakout drama of love and sex in Paris. He played Tomas, a narcissistic film director who leaves his long-suffering husband for a newly suffering girlfriend. It turned him from trade secret into film star.

Today, he arrives at a London photographic studio alone, with a warm, wide smile. He wears a sunshine-yellow rain jacket. His new film is Bird, from the celebrated UK filmmaker Andrea Arnold. It unfolds in Gravesend, Kent, where a troubled 12-year-old girl lives in a rambling squat. And Rogowski plays… well. Here things get complicated. His character is Bird himself. But exactly what that means still puzzles even the actor. Most obviously a father figure to the young heroine, Bird might also be an imaginary friend, ghost or animal spirit.

When Rogowski met Arnold, she explained the character came to her in a dreamlike image. “She told me she’d pictured a naked man on top of a skyscraper, with a huge penis. But he was also Mary Poppins. I said, ‘Look, I adore your work, and I have no clue what you are talking about, but I want to be a part of it.’” His face stays deadpan. “‘However, I can only provide a normal-size penis.’”

Arnold says the casting was instinctive: “I had a big emotional response to Franz’s face and physicality.” Like her, he was once a professional dancer, which Arnold didn’t know then but thinks she picked up subconsciously. “And I sensed he would be generous and brave.” On screen, Rogowski does what the best movie actors do, giving something unique to him while also vanishing into his role. For Haneke in Happy End, he performed a frantic dance to Sia’s “Chandelier”. But German director Christian Petzold saw something more interior, casting him as the star of Transit (2018), set in a modern France under fascist occupation. The film was a hit (Barack Obama was a fan). Petzold says it never felt a risk to give Rogowski his then-highest-profile role: “I thought the world needed to be seen through his sadness.” 

If there is no stock Rogowski character, sadness is a theme: a lonely independence. A person between places too. In Transit, he was German in a France old and new, living with a stolen identity. Passages saw him criss-cross sexualities. Now, with Bird, he is a riddle.

In conversation, he tends to answer questions looking into the distance. Then he meets your eye again, as if marking a full stop. In his life too, different perspectives co-exist. He is in a relationship that is “very important” to him. “But I also need my own space. I love to have a close connection with my friends in Berlin, but sometimes I get overwhelmed by my emotions, and then I need to be away.”

He lives in Friedrichshain, home to the famous Berghain nightclub. “Friedrichshain tries to be as cool as our neighbour Kreuzberg, but never quite gets there. So I’m surrounded by wannabes. And I’m one too.” A wannabe? After so many red carpets? Rogowski smiles. “Yeah, people keep telling me I’m a ‘be’ now. But I know I am still a wannabe that on a daily basis is not very impressive. Silly, in fact.” Silly. He turns oddly sombre saying it.

Rogowski grew up in Tübingen, south-west Germany, his father a doctor, his mother a midwife. School was made a trial by bullying and what he believes was ADHD. “It was like torture to sit still, and be forced into group learning. I work much better with a task I can turn into my task.” By 16, he was depressed and perpetually stoned. He left home to study acting in Stuttgart. It didn’t take. A year at a Swiss clown school ended with a request that he pursue his learning elsewhere. Finally, he trained in dance. Into his 20s, he worked across Europe before circling back to acting, in theatre and then film.

Now, he is close to his parents. (In 2022, he took his father to the older man’s first Berlin techno party.) But the Rogowskis remain an “existential” family. “When you are happy, they see it as…” He searches for the right English word. “Fishy.” He grins. “And the career I’m having is a lovely rollercoaster ride. But I don’t believe it will save me.” Still, he says he understands himself more now: “People with ADHD need extreme situations to calm down.” 

For Rogowski, some of that is found at altitude. Under his yellow jacket, his T-shirt has a climbing print. The sport is a passion. Bouldering is fun, he says of the gym-based version: “You chat about life and discreetly look at people’s asses.” But the real thing is outdoors. “It’s nice making food under the stars. And the heights are addictive.”

Another remedy is making films. Movie sets have proved a perfect fit: doing his task, among others doing theirs. “So when I shoot a film, I focus.” Yet Bird was still a challenge. Arnold never shared more than the next day’s script pages at a time, keeping things free but with no time to rehearse. Many of his co-stars were children, and first-time actors. “Kids can be terrifying. Terrifyingly honest.” 

“They loved him,” Arnold says. She quickly saw him as her “comrade” too amid the chaos of a shoot. “Franz got the least of my attention because he was so self-reliant, but he was always thoughtful and giving.”

He even made peace with his wardrobe: a mud-brown jumper, hiking sandals and baggy skirt. Alex Bovaird, costume designer on Bird, The White Lotus and more, helped bring Arnold’s vision to life. “He’s supposed to be a mystery. From elsewhere somehow. So we wanted him to look warm, but strange. The clothes weren’t the hodgepodge a cool person would wear.”

The film was not the first time his clothes have stolen scenes. In Passages, Tomas’s outfits spoke volumes: a confronting array of mesh, snakeskin and outré knitwear. He first meets the parents of the woman having his baby in a semi-sheer crop top. “The clothes in Passages create frictions,” Rogowski says. “They even tell the story.” The role would bring him relationships with brands including Cartier. Today he drily calls himself a “salesman” while still taking seriously the job of modelling; every pose, he says, is a performance.

After Passages became a hit, he also got used to people asking what he and Tomas did and didn’t have in common. “Ever since, everyone has tried to find out, ‘Oh, how gay is he? How straight is he?’ But I like a space between the public me, including the roles, and the real me.” 

He did blur the line though, a little. A couple of outfits from Passages were taken home. A distressed lime-green sweater is among his daily wardrobe. “The leopardskin trousers too.” And he will sometimes use his voice in the world outside film. This summer he appeared in a video encouraging Germans to vote in European elections. Democracy needs help, he says. “When people suffer, they want a quick fix. And democracy is slow, and annoying.” The nub is money. “The real tension now is not left and right, but poor and rich. And the problem is big corporations not paying their taxes.”

Making Bird, Rogowski saw the UK outside London for the first time. That disturbed him too. “People in Gravesend were kind and open. But they have been forgotten. And just 25 miles away is the wealth of London, where if you went to the right university, or were born into the right family, life is as good as it gets.”

He sees London as yet another double-edged sword: harsh and seductive. He’d like to move to the city, he says, for the architecture and speed of life. “But I wonder if the dream is the most beautiful thing about it, and it would be better not to make it real?”

A similar logic might apply elsewhere. After so much acclaim, the standard future for a European actor would include a US streaming series, or Oscar races. Rogowski’s arc might be different. “Yeah, I’m getting richer and richer. More and more famous.” His expression falls between wry and something more flinty. “And that is great. But an acting career is not permanent. And when I accomplish something, I tend not to think ‘OK, this is who I am now.’” He turns to face me. “I think, ‘Let’s try something else.’”

Grooming, Jody Taylor at Left Side Creative. Photographer’s assistant, Sam Harrison. Stylist’s assistants, Frankie Martin and Rachel Van Brussel. Production, Town