Lars Eidinger

Ingo in Personal Shopper (2016) is a small part, and Lars Eidinger spends it being unpleasant to Kristen Stewart in the way people are unpleasant to staff when they want something. What we remember is not the unpleasantness but the pleasure. He lets us see Ingo enjoying it, and he lets us see, a fraction behind that, an actor who knows we can see it. We disliked the man within a minute and were faintly annoyed at how deliberately we had been made to. That is the Eidinger habit: the character, and the performer standing just beside him, watching for our reaction.

He came to it from the stage, and the stage is still where the reputation lives. Trained at the Ernst Busch Academy in Berlin, he joined the Schaubühne ensemble in 1999 and became known for Thomas Ostermeier's productions of Hamlet (2008) and Richard III, performances that were physical, improvised in places and liable to spill off the stage into the seats. Film arrived comparatively late, with Maren Ade's Everyone Else (2009), and international notice later still, with Assayas's Clouds of Sils Maria (2014). Assayas has now used him three times, in that film, in Personal Shopper and in the miniseries Irma Vep (2022), and Babylon Berlin (2017) made him a fixture of German television. He has not given up the theatre for any of it.

The method is Brechtian in the plain sense: he shows you that he is showing you. He has put it more simply himself: "I never become somebody else. The only thing I try to achieve is to become myself." With a live audience to play against, that unpredictability is the point. On film, where the camera does not answer back, it can curdle. His screen work has been called cartoonish and self-indulgent, and SS-GB (2017) drew exactly that complaint. The quality that makes him worth the ticket for Ostermeier can look, in a period thriller, like a man refusing to fit inside the frame.

Assayas has worked out what to do with him, and the answer is to cast him as people who are already performing. Ingo is a lover on display, and Irma Vep gives him Gottfried, a part built around exactly this provocation. In those hands the visible actor becomes a character trait rather than a leak. That is why we would send you to Personal Shopper first, small part and all. Elsewhere he divides people, and seems content to. Go in expecting to be shown a performance rather than fooled by one, and decide whether you find that honest or exhausting.