Helena Zengel does most of her acting without dialogue, and the less she is given to say the harder she is to look away from. The question now is what she does once she is allowed to speak.
Fi1m perspective
In News of the World (2020) Helena Zengel goes almost the whole film without a word of English. Her Johanna, born German and raised Kiowa, eats with her hands, bolts at the sound of a wagon wheel, sings to the dead and looks at Tom Hanks the way a cat looks at a stranger's hand. Then the two of them begin trading words for things, bird and horse and bread, and Paul Greengrass's slow, handsome Western settles into a rhythm it never quite loses. She is the reason to watch it.
She began at five, in a music video for a Berlin band, and put in the usual small parts in German television before Mascha Schilinski gave her a lead in Die Tochter (2017). The part that made her name was Benni in Nora Fingscheidt's System Crasher (2019), a nine-year-old the care system keeps passing along, played at full volume. We have not reviewed it, but by all accounts it is the loud end of what she does, and Greengrass cast her soon after for the quiet end. Since then she has led The Legend of Ochi (2025), an American fantasy adventure opposite Willem Dafoe, and taken her first adult role, in the German series Westend Girl (2026).
What she does that other young actors do not is refuse to ask for our sympathy. Most children on screen are directed to be liked, and it shows in the eyes; Zengel's eyes are busy with something else, usually working out whether the adult in front of her is a threat. It makes her hard to read and impossible to ignore. We sat through a hundred minutes of News of the World dry-eyed and slightly restless, and then the last ten, which we will not describe, caught us out completely. The credit belongs to her face, and to Hanks for letting it have the scene.
The caveat is that she has so far been cast, nearly every time, as a troubled girl who says what she means with her body rather than her mouth. That is a real gift and a narrow one, and children with a gift for damage tend to be handed damage until they stop being children. Westend Girl is the first test of what she does as a grown woman with lines to learn. Watching System Crasher again recently, she said, "It doesn't feel like me." That is probably as it should be.
Biography
Helena Zengel is a German actress. She was born on 10 June 2008 in Berlin and began acting at the age of five.
Zengel first gained attention for her leading performance as Benni in the 2019 drama System Crasher, for which she won the German Film Award for Best Actress, becoming the youngest recipient of the prize. She played Johanna Leonberger opposite Tom Hanks in the 2020 Western News of the World, directed by Paul Greengrass, and received nominations for a Golden Globe Award and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Best Supporting Actress.
