Nina Hoss Avoided the Trap of ‘the Sex-Bomb Blonde’ Early on — Now, She Gets to Be an Unhinged Bisexual in ‘Hedda’
On December 4, the IndieWire Honors Winter 2025 ceremony will celebrate the creators and stars responsible for crafting some of the year’s best films. Curated and selected by IndieWire’s editorial team, IndieWire Honors is a celebration of the filmmakers, artisans, and performers behind films well worth toasting. In the days leading up to the Los Angeles event, IndieWire is showcasing their work with new interviews and tributes from their peers.
The great Nina Hoss doesn’t need to work herself up into crying onstage or onscreen if the moment is right and she’s really feeling it.
Earlier this year, in spring 2025, the Berlin Silver Bear-winning actress (2007’s “Yella”) starred onstage at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo, New York City, as melancholy matriarch Lyubov Ranevskaya in Benedict Andrews’ “The Cherry Orchard,” an adaptation of the Anton Chekhov classic. Seated two rows from the theater-in-the-round-style stage at St. Ann’s, I observed Hoss actually weeping during a key emotional scene.
In her latest exquisite performance in a long career of them already, as Eileen Lovborg in writer/director Nia DaCosta’s gender-swapped Henrik Ibsen adaptation “Hedda,” Hoss also lathers herself up into gamut-spanning stages of emotional distress. Whether wasted out of her mind after Hedda Gabler (Tessa Thompson) coaxes Hoss’ imperious literature professor off the wagon, or a sobbing, heaving wreck of herself when the pages of her latest book go missing at a 1950s mansion party. It’s another extraordinary, unmannered, and deeply felt performance from one of Europe’s best working actors.
“It’s slightly weird to talk about that because, in a way, I don’t even think of [how to make myself cry]. When I put myself in this situation, in this moment, that’s just what happens,” said Hoss, who will receive this year’s Spotlight Award at the 2026 winter IndieWire Honors ceremony on Thursday, December 4. “I don’t have another part of my brain going on to push me into creating tears, like a technique. Some [actors] can, when they go, ‘OK, I can cry like this,’ I could potentially. But I don’t see it as a competition in ‘can I cry on the spot or not?’ I need the situation that the character’s in to put myself into that moment, and then that’s what happens. That happened every show [of ‘The Cherry Orchard’] because I find it genuinely sad in that moment.”
Hoss, who starred as Cate Blanchett’s watchful partner in “TÁR” and on TV’s “Homeland” for three seasons, is best known for her alchemical collaborations with director Christian Petzold across six films: There was “Yella,” but also “Barbara,” “Phoenix,” and more, though Hoss has not worked with the director since 2014’s devastating post-World War II drama “Phoenix,” where she played a Hitchcockian Auschwitz survivor whose husband does not recognize her after facial reconstructive surgery. And the story of how Petzold discovered Hoss for his 2001 film “Something to Remind Me” is Hitchcockian in itself, much the way Hitch discovered Tippi Hedren in a TV commercial for diet soda.
This was after Hoss broke out in the 1996 period drama “A Girl Called Rosemary.”
“I was aware… that I could be put into a certain kind of drawer when I did my first big role, which was huge in Germany. Eight million people saw it, and that was the part of a prostitute, a woman who really existed,” Hoss said. “It was a criminal story, and I looked a bit like Marilyn Monroe, so you could think, ‘Oh, my God, she’s the new sex-bomb blonde thing.’ Luckily enough, you have to go on talk shows to promote the film. Obviously, I said things that didn’t sound too dumb, and that’s why Christian Petzold saw one of these talk shows and said, ‘Oh, she’s completely different from what I thought she would be.’ We met, and we worked on six films together after that. That hindered me [from] falling into that kind of trap, or having to work myself out of that perception [as a sex symbol].”
“Then it was over with being a sex bomb — when I started working with Christian,” Hoss laughed. “There was one headline that I actually thought was amazing. It was like, ‘The pin-up girl for intellectuals.’”
In “Hedda,” Hoss plays a role originally written for a man, flipped for the first time here into a bisexual woman who Thompson’s disaffected and devious social climber once loved. Hoss had previously spent six years onstage in a German repertory theater production of “Hedda Gabler” in various roles, including as Hedda herself. “She’s a destructive person, but she’s not a psychopath,” Hoss said of Hedda.
“We have this repertoire system, which means I’m part of the ensemble, which I was for like 25 years,” Hoss said. “I played different characters each night. So I played Medea the evening before I play a comedy. After that, then I play Hedda, then I play Emilia Galotti. Sometimes, I had six plays running at the same time. That’s how the repertoire system is in Germany. You get to revisit Hedda, sometimes after having a break of two weeks, or sometimes even a month. It’s still fresh and new and vulnerable because you try to remember the text, and at the same time, you want to push yourself and find something new. Then, you grow older with the character … and there’s always one moment [where] there’s something that could be better. All of a sudden, it clicks, because you had an experience, and you say, ‘Oh, that’s why she said that’ or ‘I need to change that.’ You have little revelations because you spend so much time with the character.”
Hoss shot “Hedda” in early 2024 in the United Kingdom, where she said playing Ibsen’s Ejlert part as the female Eileen was “easy for me, in a way, because just by the fact that she’s a woman, it made it so much more dangerous for Hedda, and I think that’s what I was always looking for. While playing Hedda, I thought it would be so interesting — and I was never quite sure — it comes with the play that Ibsen wrote that these two men that Hedda is framed with [including her husband George] are not really on her level. Here with Eileen, there is someone on her level, and they meet eye to eye, and all of a sudden, Hedda is in danger because there is someone who really knows her, and knows how manipulative she is, and finds that exciting but is also aware of what she’s capable of doing.”
Hoss ultimately had to confront her feelings about Ejlert circa her days on the stage by stepping into his very shoes for this gorgeously sinuous film: “That came somehow with just being a woman at the time because it’s still [Ibsen’s] text. I’m saying a man’s words. There was no discrepancy. The fight is the same. Because of the patriarchal structure Eileen is under, that makes it so much more of an existential struggle for her than it is for Ejlert. That was just phenomenal to explore and work on.”
Something I always like to ask actors who play characters in various states of inebriation: What’s the secret to playing a good, old-fashioned sloppy drunk? By the end of “Hedda,” Eileen is properly sauced despite showing up to her former protégé’s party newly sober. Shooting out of order, Hoss had to teeter quite literally between different registers of sobriety and not.
“That was the main thing I always [asked] Nia, ‘So where am I now? What state am I in? How drunk is she?’ At a certain point, I also thought there are some moments, like when you go into water, that sober you. If you have this existential moment that she knows she probably lost her manuscript, after that, you’re not that drunk anymore. It’s as if it flushes all the alcohol out of your system. These were the things I had to be very precise with, and then you just have to rein it in. It’s such fun playing drunk, but it’s not very interesting to watch,” she laughed. “It’s always more interesting to see someone struggling, trying to keep it together, because that’s what drunks do. They pretend they’re not drunk.”
Hoss’ character in “Tár” — Lydia’s (Blanchett) partner but also the first violinist of the Berlin symphony — is more emotionally restricted and always watching. In “Hedda,” Hoss gets to unleash emotionally, though onscreen breakdowns never take a piece out of her the way they might other actors.
“I’m good at switching off because, at the end of the day, I experience it in this moment. I just try to live it in that moment, and then when it’s over, it’s over,” Hoss said. “You have to hold it at a certain energy level because you know you probably have to do it several times. So I know I can’t relax, but I don’t stay in it because I’m not living it then. Once the scene is over, I have a little break, and then I go back in, but I don’t carry it. It’s not intervening in my life.”
But, Hoss said, it depends what you’re working on. “If it’s continuously dark, like when I did ‘Medea,’ that puts you into a slightly depressive mode. To motivate what she’s doing, and what she’s going through, to put her in that moment, is so dark and heavy that it’s hard [not to] get into a bad mood about the world and life, everything, relationships. It does trickle into your life, the material you work on. But when we talk about Eileen, I go full in, and then I have to go out to regain some energy again. If I would stay in it the whole time, I would be completely depleted.”
The most potent moment in “Hedda,” for Hoss and the audience, is the scene in which Eileen arrives at Hedda’s party, with Thompson affixed, Spike Lee-style, on a floating dolly as she’s drawn amorously toward her former lover. Eileen stands there, domineeringly, in a position of power and seduction.
“I had no idea up until that moment, even though we had rehearsed. Tessa had always just walked up to me, which I found quite strong, also. So I thought, OK, that’s what we’re doing. Nia didn’t talk to me about that,” Hoss said. “When I came down to the room and saw Tessa being strapped on this dolly, I said, ‘What are we doing? What’s happening?’ But then it just made so much sense, and I felt very appreciative that, in a way, my character and therefore also me, the actress inhabiting this character, gets this huge present of an entrance like that. I can’t act that as the others have to do. This moment is there, where time stands still.”
”Hedda” is now streaming on Prime Video.
