Speaking via Zoom recently, Zengel was much more laughing and talkative – that is, much more like a normal 12-year-old girl – than his recent roles may suggest. She said that, like most children in Germany, she spent most of the year at home and that she was currently in quarantine because her classmates had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Before being cast in the film, she said, she had never heard of Hanks. “I think I’ve seen ‘The Da Vinci Code’ before, but I didn’t know who it was,” she said. “I thought you were just an actor.”
In an e-mail, Hanks praised Zengel’s ability to act “without accumulation, without apprehension and without embarrassment”, and said he would like to have “the same ease and simplicity of it”.
Zengel said he had never taken an acting course, “because I’m not sure there was much to learn”.
“I stand in front of the camera, I know what I want and I do it,” she said matter-of-factly.
That focus and willpower, explained her mother, Anne Zengel, has been her daughter’s trademark since she was a child. Her first forays as an actress, at the age of 4, came largely from her parents’ frustration, she said, because her daughter was “three times more intense” than other children and acted badly if she was denied something she wanted.
“It had to work in society, so we had to figure out how to redirect its energy,” she said.