The preteen who outshines Tom Hanks: meet Helena Zengel, Oscar sensation in waiting
Early chatter about the handsome, guilt-ridden western News of the World focused on the prestige Tom Hanks lent to it by starring, as a widowed Civil War veteran bringing hope from far horizons to woebegone small-town Texas in 1870. But he’s been upstaged.
Following the nominations last week for the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild awards, it’s increasingly clear that if this film gets any Oscar love, it’s far more likely to be for Hanks’ gifted co-star – a 12-year-old German actress called Helena Zengel, making her American film debut.
Were Zengel to win Best Supporting Actress, she’d be the youngest performer to take home an Oscar since 11-year-old Anna Paquin in The Piano (in 1994, the same year Hanks won for Philadelphia). What makes it a real possibility is that Zengel does much more than hold her own.
In the role of orphaned 10-year-old Johanna Leonberger, whom Hanks’s Capt Kidd rescues from her long captivity among the Kiowa people, she gives Paul Greengrass’s picture a huge amount of its emotional and dramatic punch.
Finding her was a major stroke of luck for the production. Zengel began her acting career when she was just five, in a music video for a Berlin alt-rock band called Abby, and was cast in a leading role at eight – in a prickly piece called The Daughter (2017), about a young girl jealous of her father’s affections when her separated parents fall back in love.
It was a further wild child character – an ungovernable foster child, in the social-services drama System Crasher (2019) – which alerted the industry to her astonishing raw talent. Given to outbursts of blistering rage and physical violence, her character, Benni, had a heartbreaking vulnerability beneath a whole heap of punk-rock attitude. Zengel was rewarded with a series of Best Actress awards at international film festivals for bringing this fiend to life.
It was during that film, which he screened at the behest of his producer, Gail Mutrux, that Greengrass realised his all-important casting search for Johanna was over, having expected it to take months. He needed someone who was German, of that exact age, and able to fit the period look as a downtrodden immigrant. He was simply bowled over – it’s hard not to be – by what System Crasher showed Zengel can do. “It’s going to have to be her,” he remembers thinking mid-watch, before meeting to audition her a week later.
For hours, despite Zengel’s limited English, they discussed the role, and she played through the scene where she has to bite Hanks’s hand and scream. She had no idea how well or badly she’d performed until they told her on the spot she’d been cast.
As research before the shoot in New Mexico, Zengel spent six weeks absorbing the language and culture of the Kiowa tribe, and also sunbathing to darken her natural pallor. She didn’t know who Hanks was before signing on, and hadn’t met him until he paid her a surprise visit in the make-up trailer. After three takes of her first scene, he walked up to Greengrass and said, “She’s absolutely brilliant.”
“Any anxiety I felt about her as an 11-year-old just disappeared,” Greengrass has explained. The challenges of the part are quite intense – she has to switch in and out of three different languages, but communicate even more with silence, internalising the trauma of two wildly different upbringings. She took to it all with an awareness of camera technique that left Greengrass amazed.
And now? She has signed to the mega-agency CAA, and already has her own website which enables you to listen to her podcast, and post your email for the latest Zengel news. She declares that her ambitions are to someday get a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, to choose her own films without feeling unduly pressured, and “maybe get an Oscar”. The force of determination she projects on screen suggests we ain’t seen nothing yet.
