A few years ago, the German actress Nina Hoss, who’d already played the title role in “Hedda Gabler” onstage, got a phone call. Hedda, Ibsen’s great antiheroine, is one of the canon’s most enigmatic female characters: a woman hemmed in by men and adept at manipulating them. The filmmaker Nia DaCosta (“Candyman”) had transposed the action from nineteenth-century Oslo to nineteen-fifties Britain, and Tessa Thompson would star. Was Hoss interested in reading for a part? She said yes, hung up, and then remembered her Ibsen. If Thompson was Hedda, who would she be?
The answer was Eileen Lovborg, a gender-swapped version of Hedda’s ex, Eilert Lovborg. As a woman with autonomy—an ascendant lesbian professor whose subject is “the future of sex”—Eileen becomes a foil for the bored newlywed Hedda. She’s also a threat to Hedda’s husband, an academic rival. Hoss said, “There’s something other than just the power struggle going on between these two characters, because they want the same job, or they want the same woman, which is basically just two—” She paused, searching for the word in English, and flapped her elbows to illustrate. “Would you call them cocks?”
Hoss was sitting in a booth at Russ & Daughters, a New York haunt of hers since the avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson introduced her to it in 2016. She wore a boxy blazer with the sleeves rolled up, her blond curls pulled back in a short ponytail, and ordered black coffee, a cherry shrub, and an everything bagel with lox. Hoss, who has played a quietly complicit wife in “Tár” and an icy executive in “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” can leave an impression without speaking a line: often, she’s the one arguing that dialogue should be trimmed, trusting that a wordless exchange is more effective. “The camera will take what she needs,” she said. “I enjoy that reduction, the precision—and the listening. There’s so much going on when someone is listening!”
Hoss grew up in Stuttgart, surrounded by activists and artists. Her mother was a theatre director and actor; her father was a trade unionist and a founder of Germany’s Green party. At his fiftieth birthday, the five-year-old Hoss climbed onto a stage, unprompted, and sang the antiwar ballad “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” The adults in the room thought her parents had put her up to it. “I was so angry that they wouldn’t take me seriously,” she said. “In hindsight, I think that’s where I thought, I’m gonna show them!” By age nine, she was doing radio plays, sitting in on her father’s parliamentary sessions, and watching classic films with her mother, who liked to analyze the actresses: Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe.
The family also attended protests; at one anti-nuclear action in the eighties, they all dressed up as clowns. “We would keep a colorful, light component,” Hoss said. “But I also saw my dad being carried away by police into a van.” The jolly strategy and swift retaliation weren’t far off from today’s showdowns between costumed protesters and ICE. “I mean, here we are again,” she said.
Her mother directed her in her stage début, at fourteen; by eighteen, she’d done a film. Hoss, now fifty, has alternated between the two mediums ever since. When a play brought her to New York in 2018, she was astonished by how “free” the crowd felt: reacting aloud, even shouting back at the actors. “That would never happen in Germany,” she said. “They all check in on each other in the audience, like, ‘Behave!’ Which is frustrating for us up there.” A waiter refilled her coffee for the fourth time. She thanked him, miming hyper-caffeinated jitters.
Hoss had a week in town before flying to London to start shooting “The Julia Set,” with Gillian Anderson and Chase Infiniti. When brunch was over, she stepped outside and put on a pair of round sunglasses. She ambled down Orchard Street, window-shopping, until a small, cluttered camera store caught her eye. She moved between glass cases stuffed with vintage equipment, cooing over some Leicas before stopping to admire a classic Hasselblad. “Those were used for the first photo shoots I did,” she said. She loved the satisfying chh-chhk of the shutter. “When people take photos these days, they don’t do that,” she said. “So you stare into the void, thinking, Did they get it?” She laughed. “I still wait for the click!” ♦
