David Kross has a face that cannot keep a secret, and he has built a career out of letting it show. Best when playing young men caught between one life and the next, he is the reason to watch a film we otherwise found wanting.
Fi1m perspective
A boy sits on the edge of a bed reading The Odyssey aloud to a woman who has shut her eyes to listen. He is not performing for her; he is simply pleased, and the pleasure is all over his face. That is the moment in The Reader (2008) we remember, and it is the whole of what David Kross does. He was a teenager when it was shot and looks it, and Stephen Daldry had the sense to point the camera at him and wait.
The career runs on two tracks. He began with a small part in Hilfe, ich bin ein Junge (2002) while still at school, and Detlev Buck gave him the lead in Knallhart (2006), the first of three films they have made together, all of them about the young and the badly placed. He was cast in The Reader at fifteen, had to learn English for it, and waited until he was eighteen before filming could begin. The same year he took the title role in Krabat (2008), a German fantasy adaptation, and since then he has moved between German productions and English-language ones: Gunther in Steven Spielberg's War Horse (2011), the goalkeeper Bert Trautmann in The Keeper (2018), and steady work in both languages into the 2020s.
What he is asked for, again and again, is the young man at a crossing: Michael Berg with a summer he does not yet understand, Trautmann between a war and a football club. He gives these parts a plainness that is easy to undervalue. He does not signal what a scene means; he lets it happen to him. We gave The Reader a 56, and we stand by that, because the film is far too tidy about the questions it raises. But sitting in the dark watching Kross read to Kate Winslet, we were moved, and we were moved because he made two people being happy look like something that had never been filmed before. Some American critics found his performance uneven. We think what they were noticing is a film that cools as it goes, and that the cooling is Daldry's, not his.
The risk for an actor like this is that openness reads as blankness once he is no longer nineteen, and that directors keep casting the boy after the boy has gone. Buck has evidently found more in him than that, three times over. For the rest of us, the first hour of The Reader remains the place to start, and it is worth remembering, when the second hour arrives and the film starts explaining itself, that none of that is Kross's fault.
Biography
David Kross (also credited as David Kroß) is a German actor. Born on 4 July 1990 in Bargteheide, Schleswig-Holstein, he made his screen debut as a child in the 2002 film Hilfe, ich bin ein Junge and gained attention for his lead role in Knallhart (2006).
He achieved international recognition playing the teenage Michael Berg in Stephen Daldry’s The Reader (2008), opposite Kate Winslet. For the performance he received nominations including a European Film Award and won the Sierra Award for Youth in Film from the Las Vegas Film Critics Society. He also won the Chopard Trophy at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival.
Kross has since appeared in both German and English-language productions, including War Horse (2011), Into the White (2012), Race (2016), The Keeper (2018) and The King’s Man (2021). He briefly studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
