"I feel Uncomfortable Floating In The Middle"
A portrait on Lars Eidinger from the 64th Cannes Film Festival
‘I’m the most narcissistic character ever,’ Lars Eidinger confesses unapologetically while letting out a hearty laugh. A strange, warm, masculine face with a hint of the feminine. A strong muscular body slinking like a feline. Openness blended with an air of aloofness. Lars Eidinger is debuting in Cannes with his second feature film, Code Blue by Urszula Antoniak.
I ask him if a constant need for feedback is a sign of extreme narcissism and insecurity. ‘If you do not get enough attention from your parents when you are a child, then you are in constant need for feedback to learn from yourself. As an actor, I want to provoke reactions, but not for the sake of provoking. That’s dumb. But to make an impact on people and jolt them out of their comfort zone so that they can see things from a different place, and learn from their own reactions. I love going to the extremes when I act. Pushing your boundaries helps you learn a lot about yourself. I feel uncomfortable floating mildly in the middle. And yes, seeking constant feedback is a sure sign of insecurity.’
‘Edna’ is the first word that comes into his mind if he hears his own name. The reason: whenever he goes to fetch his spunky five-year-old daughter, Edna, from kindergarten, she greets him with the exclamation ‘Lars Eidinger’ instead of the word ‘daddy’ – as an average five-year-old would say to their father. In Germany, Lars Eidinger is a rising star. He made his feature film debut in 2009 with Maren Ade’s Everyone Else, but by then he had already been an acclaimed stage actor at the renowned Berlin theatre, Schaubühne.
Flitting from one extreme to the other on stage, while indulging his ‘need for being watched’ for the sake of self-exploration, becomes the opposite at home. ‘After getting all these reactions, I have to withdraw into myself. I relish being secluded in a room. I really have to go through all these reactions, synthesize and integrate them. You cannot always be in the state of self-expression. After a while you’ll have nothing to express. Acting is a kind of therapy for me.’ When confronted with the question of whether going into therapy to cure his narcissism would kill off his acting gift, he agrees.
When asked where his acting gift lies, he says it’s the ability to evolve a character from being in a single situation into a complete, subtly moulded conglomerate of a personality tangled up in a predicament, instead of creating the situations from previously worked-out character fragments. ‘This prevents me from slipping into mannerism and acting on what people already like in me.’ He has just finished three German films to be released later this year. He shot one with Christophe Stark, another with Hendrik Handloegten, and he will be in a movie by a debuting young German director.
He wants to blast into the US film industry, too. ‘I’m sure no one would ask me to play a mainstream role. Even my wife says that sometimes it’s painful to watch what plays out on my face. I know my face just doesn’t gel with the taste of mainstream audiences.’ When I ask him what he thinks about his femininity, he confidently leans into my face: ‘I love it. If a male is only a male, he’s just a brute.’
His frankness is disarming. I ask him what he wants next. ‘I want to explore and I want to be explored.’
We should keep an eye on him.