“7 Days in Entebbe,” directed by Brazilian José Padilha, departs from the traditional narrative of Entebbe that’s been enshrined in Israeli lore. That made me curious to do some more research.” “I just wanted to go back in time and dig a little bit further and get into the mindset of a person who was taking the decision to not only be politically active, but to go that extra step and be a radical and join a mission in which a left-wing German terrorist is hijacking a plane with Jewish passengers,” he said. The period when the hijacking happened resonates for Bruhl, who was born two years later and heard his parents talking about the leftist groups. For “The Zookeeper’s Wife,” a Holocaust drama based on a true story, he and co-star Jessica Chastain met with the titular zookeeper’s daughter.Īnd for “Entebbe,” Bruhl read up on the German far-left activists of the 1960s and 1970s, including Revolutionary Cells, the urban terrorist group that conducted the Entebbe hijacking. For “Inglourious Basterds,” a revenge fantasy that cared little for historical accuracy (the movie has – spoiler alert! – a Jew machine-gunning Hitler in the face in 1944), Bruhl took courses with a sniper. This is what drives me.”īruhl does historical research to prepare for those roles. I’m not Swedish or Finnish, or I’m not from India, so being a German-Spanish actor, of course I’m participating in projects that deal with the history of my countries… I want to understand where I come from. “It’s important to read about history, to analyze history, to also understand where we are right now. “I’m always interested in history,” he added. When I decided to take these parts it was always out of an interest in period projects, in history.”īruhl, left, was introduced to a broad American audience in “Inglorious Basterds.” He’s shown here in 2009 with co-star Brad Pitt. I wouldn’t have liked to be typecast and limited to that. Fortunately, I can say I’ve done many different things. “Looking back, there’s a body of work which is very diverse. “I’ve done so many different things,” he said. And in an interview with JTA, Bruhl made clear that he doesn’t want such roles to define him. In “Entebbe,” he plays a German bad guy grappling with his country’s recent history. In addition to films about World War II, the Entebbe raid and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bruhl was in “The Carpenter’s Pencil,” about the Spanish Civil War, as well as dramas set in Franco’s Spain and 1970s Chile. But it also has to do with his interest in historical events. The multiplicity of such roles, Bruhl said, is a natural consequence of being a German actor in an industry that keeps churning out World War II movies. “Ever thought about that?” At another point, Bruhl’s character, Wilfred Bose, insists, “I’m no Nazi.”īruhl, 39, who was born in Spain and grew up in Germany, had his breakout role in the 2003 film “Goodbye, Lenin!” about East Germany at the end of the Cold War, and met American audiences six years later playing a Nazi war hero in Quentin Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds.” Although he has played the Gilded Age criminal psychologist Lazlo Kreizler in the TNT series “The Alienist” and an investigative journalist who recovers World War II-era art in “Woman in Gold,” in five different films he has been called on to play Nazis, a civil servant under the Nazis or a supervillain from a Nazi family. “Germans killing Jews,” an associate of his says. But the parallels to their German forebears are clear. Even as they hold Jews at gunpoint, the two insist they are “humanitarian” activists fighting against fascism. The movie, about the 1976 Israeli rescue operation that freed the mainly Jewish and Israeli hostages of a hijacked plane in Uganda, focuses on the conflicted experiences of the two Germans – played by Bruhl and Rosamund Pike - who allied with Palestinian terrorists to hijack the Paris-bound plane. ( JTA) – In “7 Days in Entebbe,” which hits theaters on Friday, Daniel Bruhl plays a German leftist terrorist tortured by the fact that he’s hijacking a plane full of Jews and taking them prisoner.
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