The world is about to see a lot more of Lars Eidinger.
The German actor is a towering leading man in his own country, whether onstage, were he is a member of the ensemble of Berlin’s Schaubühne theatre, or screen, from playing an introverted husband in a toxic relationship in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009) to, in Matthias Glasner’s Dying (2024), the most turbulent conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic since Cate Blanchett’s Lydia Tár. And he has skirted around the outskirts of international scene. He was the boyfriend of Kristen Stewart’s celebrity employer in Olivier Assayas’ Personal Shopper (2016), played the main Nazi baddie in Netflix limited series All The Light We Cannot See (2023) and, last year, was the crazed purse thief chased down by George Clooney in Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly.
But soon the 50-year-old character actor will be joining the DCU and plotting to conquer and collect the world as Brainiac, the villain of James Gunn’s Superman sequel Man of Tomorrow.
Before that, Cannes is getting a double dose of Lars. He has two films in the festival this year. He plays Klaus Barbie — the infamous “Butcher of Lyon” — in László Nemes’ World War II drama Moulin, screening in competition, and is an architect who collaborates with both the Nazi and East German communist regimes in Volker Schlöndorff’s sweeping historic drama Visitation, playing as an out-of-competition Cannes Premiere.
