With The Teachers’ Lounge, Leonie Benesch Prepares for Global Stardom on Her Own Terms

“Let’s have smoothies,” Leonie Benesch suggests with a wide smile. “It feels very LA.” The German actor appears tickled by the very existence of a smoothie menu at this West Hollywood restaurant, and she wants to dive in. This is Benesch’s first time in the City of Angels since she was a teenager, when she promoted her debut film—and only previous Oscar contender—in Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon exactly 14 years ago. Much has changed since then: Benesch has graduated from drama school. She’s established herself as a versatile, prolific screen actor, in both movies and TV. And she’s learning to actually like this whole campaigning thing. She certainly seems to be enjoying herself on this particular December morning. “I was a baby, I knew nothing, and I found everything quite terrifying,” Benesch says of her last visit here, in 2009. “But I do find that LA imposes an American good mood on me. It’s a little bit against my will.”

The 32-year-old Benesch is in town to promote The Teachers’ Lounge, one of the year’s most acclaimed films and Germany’s official entry for the international-film Oscar. (The film was shortlisted for the award on Thursday.) Her riveting performance as a wide-eyed new teacher in an overwhelmed secondary school showcases her particular gifts: weathered innocence, deep empathy, and a bracing intelligence alive to every twist and turn in the narrative. Now in select U.S. theaters, the psychological thriller has already proven an international hit, scoring multiple European Film Award nominations and sweeping the German Film Awards, where Benesch won best actress. Domestically, it’s played at festivals all over the country, including a buzzy North American premiere in Telluride.

The charmed ride for Ilker Çatak’s breakout feature feels especially sweet knowing how tough it was to get the movie off the ground. While arguably the most significant feature in Benesch’s steady career, until its world-premiere in Berlin, The Teachers’ Lounge was treated as DOA by local distributors, who didn’t believe it contained wide appeal. “Nobody wanted to buy it because it had no ‘international potential,’” Benesch says knowingly, on the last leg of a global months-long press tour. “That was their reasoning.” The film’s power, of course, rests in its subtle universality, its visceral portrait of systemic dysfunction and inequality given a beating heart by Benesch’s Carla, a figure of near-fatal do-gooderism. Of the success—and blockbuster international sales—the movie has enjoyed since its Berlin bow, Benesch says, “I don’t know who to point you to, but personally? I think some heads should be rolling.”

Benesch projects a level of poise and savvy that’s to be expected of an actor who broke out early and abruptly, before needing to figure out how to make this kind of life work for her. She didn’t come from money and didn’t have anyone giving her advice. During the campaign for The White Ribbon, which was nominated for an Oscar, she felt “really unprotected,” thrown into the dizzying world of intensive press interviews and glamorous premieres.

The scrutiny came in part because Benesch, portraying the sweet-natured nanny Eva, made a vivid impression and emerged as a talent to watch. “I knew nothing about publicity, nothing about dress codes and all of that stuff—and I was too young,” she says. “If you are thrown into something as insane as the Oscars or red carpet in Cannes, you need someone to [tell you] you need to be dressed well, and that that entails you paying someone or having someone give you stuff. I had no one to tell me, ‘This is how it works. These people do this job. Those people do that job.’ I needed someone to tell me that.’”

She didn’t exactly have a typical first filming experience, either. This is Haneke we’re talking about. “Even though people tell you this is not what it’s usually like, you then arrive at the next set and you’re flabbergasted by the reality of what other films are like,” she says. Haneke hired an acting coach for Benesch, introducing her to method acting—a process she realized she did not care for, in real time. (“I found it a little off-putting because it’s just so serious.”) The director’s demanding nature also proved intimidating, even as he was “nothing but sweet” to Benesch directly. “If something didn’t work out by the time we got to set, Michael would have a fit,” she says. “I saw it twice and it was really scary.” (She and the director remain on friendly terms, and had lunch last month.)

Coming out of all that, then, Benesch needed to be decisive. She wanted to commit to acting but needed to take ownership. Her parents couldn’t pay for drama school, so Benesch worked and took out loans to get herself through a program in London—which she considers her real, official start as a professional performer, despite her auspicious debut with Haneke. “I had some people, especially in the German industry, tell me that it was stupid to go and leave and I wouldn’t then be able to get back in the industry and all that stuff,” she says. “But I learned most about the job at drama school. It’s to do with a moving body and space that walks and talks at the same time. It sounds so simple, but breaking it down to that, that’s my foundation now.” Toward the end of her studies, she booked a regular gig on Babylon Berlin, starring on the hit series for three seasons.

With a breakout like The White Ribbon, typecasting naturally follows. Benesch was most likely to get cast in “traumatic” projects after that role, and because she’d gone into debt to pursue an acting career, she couldn’t be especially choosy. She laughs at the memory of promoting projects she didn’t feel particularly proud of. “I’ve definitely done jobs that I wouldn’t have chosen because I needed to pay stuff back,” she says. Babylon Berlin kept her in the ingénue category, too, but the depth and success of that project stretched Benesch’s talents, allowed her to make good on her training and put her back in the spotlight.

There’s one way in which White Ribbon brought Benesch directly to The Teachers’ Lounge, though. About a decade ago, the director of the latter film, Çatak, met Benesch as a student filmmaker. Benesch was part of a panel giving out awards to a handful of people, including him. “As I was leaving, he came up to me and asked me, ‘What was it like to work with Haneke?’ and I apparently said something that Haneke always said, which is, ‘You need to know your lines and be in the moment, or the rest doesn’t matter,’” Benesch recalls. “Ilker took that, and it’s been one of his mantras when he started filmmaking.”

You could say that Teachers’ Lounge offered a kind of a closing of a chapter, then, as Benesch worked with child actors—even younger than she was when she started—and observed Çatak bring them into the process in a healthy, uncompromising fashion. “I think some kids are assholes—some kids are great…but I’m the oldest of four and I have three younger brothers. I know the reality of what young kids are like, and they’re exhausting,” she says with a laugh. “But Ilker hand selected these kids…and he sat all of them down and had intense conversations with them: ‘We are making a film. I will treat you as a colleague. I expect you to go to bed early. I want you to read the scripts and think about what you want to bring to the table.’”

Benesch was present for these conversations. She gained tremendous insight into the emotional and artistic connections made between the director and the child performers. One emotional interaction has stayed with her. Çatak asked the kids what they wanted to be when they grew up; with very few exceptions, the answers were “influencer,” “famous,” or some combination of the two. Çatak broke down. “He actually burst into tears when he started talking about art,” Benesch says. “He said, ‘What we’re creating here has nothing to do with money or fame—because we can’t bet on that.”

After Babylon Berlin, Benesch realized she could be more selective with the jobs she takes on—an evolution already accelerating with the triumph of The Teachers’ Lounge. “I’ve been able to say no so much—and I know that many of my other friends and colleagues have not,” she says.

One thing she now says no to with some regularity: Nazi characters. “I can’t even tell you how many parts I’ve turned down where I’ve been asked to play that,” Benesch says. “It’s so boring and most of it is also superficial,” she says. Sandra Hüller, another German star on the awards trail this year for both the French hit Anatomy of a Fall and the Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest, shared a similar sentiment with me recently. Benesch expresses a particular admiration for Hüller’s chilling portrayal of an Auschwitz commandant’s wife in The Zone of Interest, which is stripped of any kind of screen gloss or empathy and aligns with director Jonathan Glazer’s unadorned vision.

It’s not typical for two German-language films to be strongly competitive in the international-film Oscar race, and it is not lost on Benesch that the lauded Zone of Interest, a cinematic rendering of the Holocaust unlike any we’ve seen before, comes from a British director. “It makes me sad that it didn’t come from a German filmmaker,” she says. “I think it’s a shame.”

But she’s found one gratifying element of being in the race with that movie at the same time. Hüller’s Zone of Interest husband is played by the actor Christian Friedel, who also starred in The White Ribbon. As with Benesch, it was Friedel’s first movie. “It’s been a really sweet story,” Benesch says. “We met again in Telluride and it’s a wheel coming full circle because we keep running into each other.” He’s become a kind of friend through the whirlwind of Oscar campaigning; they text regularly as they jet around the world with perhaps the biggest films of their respective careers.

And so, is it any wonder why LA puts Benesch in a good mood? When she thinks back to the last time she was here, awkwardly standing out on red carpets with no idea how to give an interview, she still seems to cringe. But now she’s all smiles, proud of her work and prouder still, perhaps, of her ability to stand with it. “Back then I was so overwhelmed,” she says. “But I think there’s fun to be had here.” It shows.

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