Daniel Brühl: 'When you have success abroad, you become a traitor. Envy is very German'

He tugs at his beard in mock frustration – though the facial hair barely makes him look any older now, at 36, than he did back then. As we sit in a café opposite Gorlitzer Park, in the city’s hiply gritty Kreuzberg district, two women on the adjoining table whisper behind their coffee cups and jerk their heads at him. No hugs, yet.

Of late, Brühl’s encounters with fans have taken on a more exotic flavour, thanks to high-profile films such as Inglourious Basterds (he played German war hero Frederick Zoller); The Fifth Estate, in which he was Wikileaks whistleblower Daniel Domscheit-Berg to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Julian Assange; and his award-nominated turn in Rush as the Formula One driver Niki Lauda. He has just been in Buenos Aires, filming a new South American thriller, Colonia, with Emma Watson. One night he went out for a drink and on the way home, his taxi driver suddenly stopped the car. “He looked at me and said, ‘Are you Niki Lauda?’ And I said, ‘Well, no, but I played him in a film.’ He went crazy and said, ‘Can you please drive my car?’

I said, ‘Please, don’t do this to me.’ The traffic is crazy – no lights, five lanes, anarchy. It was a shitty car but I had to do it. So I drove his taxi home.”

Brühl in his breakthrough role in 'Good Bye Lenin!' (© Rex Features)
Hugs from strangers and joy-riding taxis: such are the strange perks of fame. Brühl, who is polite, cheerfully charismatic and a lot more fun than his roles might suggest, takes it all as it comes. “I don’t dislike it. It’s on a level that for me is just right,” he says. “I get enough attention for my ego that I feel important and loved from time to time. And for an actor coming out of Germany, it’s not very common to be able to work abroad. I’ve been lucky. It was always my dream.” His other dream was to open a tapas bar in Berlin, which he has also done – but more on that later.

Daniel Cesar Martin Brühl Gonzalez Domingo was born in Barcelona to a German father and a Spanish mother. The family moved to Cologne when he was a baby, following his father’s work as a documentary-maker. The household was bilingual and Brühl is fluent in five languages: German, Spanish, English, French and Catalan. He now splits his time between Berlin, where he lives in Prenzlauer Berg with his girlfriend, Felicitas, a psychologist (“which can be very helpful”, he says, raising an eyebrow) – and Barcelona, where he has a home in Gracia. “It feels very authentic. There are tourists, but not as many as in other parts of town,” he says. “If I had German [tourists] on bicycles every day, with their red faces, woah. I would…” He mimes shooting himself.

Half-German, half-Spanish, the actor evidently flits between the two as he pleases. He installed Spanish TV in his tapas bar to screen matches of his beloved FC Barcelona, but he supports the German national team, for example. “My siblings and I always thought of ourselves as being very European,” he says, simply. That adaptability, combined with talent and a face that develops endless, compellingly odd angles in front of the camera, has made him catnip for casting directors. In the next few months, he plays a German film-maker in The Face of an Angel, an Austrian lawyer in Woman in Gold, k a Spanish sidekick to Bradley Cooper’s temperamental chef in John Wells’ as-yet untitled new film, a political prisoner in Chile in Colonia and a fantasy baddie in Captain America: Civil War.

Brühl (right) as Formula One's Niki Lauda with Chris Hemsworth as James Hunt in 'Rush' (© Universal Studios)
Growing up, Brühl “tortured” his family with domestic am-dram. Aged seven, he went through a phase of playing dead, lying in the bathtub, clutching a hairdryer. Once, he staged an epic one-man puppet fairy tale; when he emerged from his booth after two hours, his entire family was asleep. “I still remember it; it was such a trauma for a small child.” Though his late father worked in TV, he did not encourage his son’s dreams. “At the beginning, he was not a fan of the idea. I remember him saying, ‘Oh, no – actors are so vain and stupid and unemployed.’”

Brühl wasn’t unemployed for long. At eight, he won a national school prize for reading out loud – “I was the best reader in Germany, so to speak. Embarrassing,” he laughs, while actually looking quite proud. It led to work in radio plays then movie dubbing. He did “very trashy films”, mainly – animations (“I played a Disney bear”) and the “lousy” early films of Jackie Chan. “That was an easy job because half of it was just ‘Ahhh! Oooh! Wahhhh!’” By the time he was 10, he was earning enough to buy his own bicycle and take girls out for ice cream. As a teenager he appeared in the German soap, Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love), playing a street child called Benji. “It was so bad. I had long hair, a leather jacket and a white rat on my shoulder. I did some really awful stuff, just to get money.” Around that time, his father introduced him to the French New Wave. “That was the moment I realised that cinema was pure magic, that I wanted to be in the movies."

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He still thrills at the process of making films, but is refreshingly dismissive of the circus that surrounds it. He is not keen on Los Angeles, for example. “I’ve never felt at home there and I’ve never been attracted to the way of life.” Awards season, meanwhile, is a horrible drag. Last year, he was nominated for a Golden Globe, a Bafta and countless more for Rush, but didn’t win anything. It was a long few months of “training his smile” and, like the psychotically competitive Lauda, he didn’t enjoy playing runner-up. “On the one hand you’re very happy – you should be happy – to be recognised. On the other hand, when it doesn’t happen, nobody can tell me that it doesn’t hurt. It’s a sporting competition and you want a gold medal.” He fiddles fiercely with the lid of his water bottle. “Everybody says, ‘Yeah, but you were part of it.’ And you start understanding that, after a couple of weeks. Or months. But while you’re sitting there… I was in LA, by a pool in a wonderful hotel, with palms and a soft breeze blowing, and you’re having a drink but you are not happy, you know? Because you’re thinking, ‘That f*****g award…’”

Brühl (second right) as Wikileaks whistleblower Daniel Domscheit-Berg, with Benedict Cumberbatch, far left, as Julian Assange, in 'The Fifth Estate' (© DreamWorks)
He channelled his disappointment – “And my anger and that weird combination of a lot of tension and then this strange silence when it [winning] didn’t happen” – into his next film, The Face of an Angel. Michael Winterbottom’s fictionalised take on the trial of Amanda Knox is out this week. Brühl plays Thomas, a dissolute, divorced director who is in Italy to make a film about the journalists covering the trial, and who is, patently, Winterbottom’s alter ego. “I have to say, I didn’t understand the script at first. I had to read it a second time, there were so many

layers,” says Brühl. On the real-life events that inspired the film and who really killed Meredith Kercher, he declares himself “completely neutral”. “I don’t know who has done it. I’m not fully convinced that she [Knox] is innocent and I’m not fully convinced that she’s done it.”

Capturing the essence of his director proved no less of an enigma. “Michael doesn’t talk a lot when you work with him – he gives you total freedom, but it’s also intimidating: sometimes you almost have too much freedom. It took me a while to understand his way of communicating with actors.” Some of the best improvised moments came in his scenes with the model-turned-actress Cara Delevingne – “a creative earthquake” – who plays a bar-girl who befriends Thomas.

Brühl in Amanda Knox-inspired drama 'The Face of an Angel'
Thomas goes to some dark places in the film – did Brühl find it a challenge? “There are always things in life you can relate to it. I’ve gone through some darker periods. The idea of being disconnected from the world because of working too much; losing yourself in it – and sometimes it’s work that doesn’t make you happy, or doesn’t come out as you’d want… creatively unhappy, socially unhappy because you don’t see your friends or your partner...” Brühl’s last relationship, with the actress Jessica Schwarz, broke down in 2006. “It suffered a lot from the fact we were both in the business, working too much and being away from home for too long.”

What’s more, the German press has given him a hard time for making it big. “The second you have success abroad, people think you’re a bit of a traitor, full of yourself. People can blame me for a lot of things – sometimes I’m not very organised, I have a lot of flaws – but my way of treating people has stayed the same. It’s a very German thing, being envious.” He is asked frequently whether he thinks he is “too good” for German films. “Very often the quality is bad: that’s the truth. And if you’re not lucky to be in the few interesting German films a year, if there are no parts for me, then what shall I do? Sit around being unhappy, frustrated and unemployed, or try to find work somewhere else?”

He is at home for a while now, shooting Alone in Berlin, a wartime film with Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson. It will give him more time to concentrate on his pride and joy: Bar Raval. Brühl opened his tapas restaurant in Kreuzberg in 2011 with a Spanish friend, Atilano Gonzalez. They had a rocky start when locals accused them of trying to gentrify the area and repeatedly graffitied “Goodbye Daniel!” on the walls, in a snide reference to Brühl’s big break. “I was a bit hurt, I have to say. I was like, ‘Why? Porque? We’re just a couple of Spanish guys.’ It was just a couple of envious idiots but they calmed down as soon as they saw that we’re not a target, that we’re not a high-end, posh place.”

Brühl photographed in his Bar Raval in Berlin Kreuzberg(© Oliver Mark)
Today, the only sign of dissent on the bar’s colourfully painted exterior is a piece of graffiti that reads “F**k Yuppies 2013”. Inside, it is light and airy with grey walls, high tables and brightly coloured leather stools. Brühl brought the tiles and vintage Spanish posters from Barcelona himself. He runs me proudly through the pata negra speciality, the wine list and their “Paella Mondays”. “I never find it stressful. I think that’s why my partner sometimes hates me, as I fly in and fly out, the fancy host who goes from table to table. I don’t have to do the unpleasant things – hiring, firing or dealing with the money.”

Instead, he sprinkles the stardust, including hosting a party for the Berlin Film Festival every year. “This year Ian McKellen came and the next day he told the festival director it was the coolest party he’d been to, which was a huge honour.”

Brühl and Gonzalez have just brought out a cookbook. Tapas! is the story of Bar Raval, with recipes, pictures and appreciative notes from celebrity diners such as Bryan Adams and Brühl’s “best/only, British friend” in Berlin, Fran Healy, the lead singer of Travis. The screenwriter Peter Morgan’s note reads like a script:

“Danny: Am I good? Really? Tell me the truth.

“Peter: The restaurant is good – no – it’s great. But the acting?

“Danny: Tell me – spare me nothing.

“Peter: The acting is sensational.”

It is, and Hollywood has noticed, too. Brühl has just been cast in the new Captain America, as the villain, Baron Helmut Zemo – “I think

I can tell you that without being thrown into Marvel prison…” – and starts shooting at the end of April. “For the first few days I’ll walk around like a little boy, just amazed by the megalomania of it. It’s such a huge project. We could do 20 films with the budget.”

Zemo is not the only villain on the cards. Brühl recently reunited with Wolfgang Becker, the director of Good Bye Lenin!, on Ich und Kaminski. “It will hopefully change my image in Germany for ever. I play a total asshole. He’s a terrible journalist, an opportunistic, selfish, vain, stupid piece of scheisse. He’s really very bad and I loved it.” Brühl grins. It’s goodbye to the old Daniel, then – and hello to the big time.

‘The Face of an Angel’ (15) is in cinemas on Friday; ‘Woman in Gold’ (PG) is out on 10 April