Dan Stevens has played lawyers, knights, Eurovision singers and Marvel characters. Now, with Germany’s Oscar submission for best international feature, I’m Your Man, the Downton Abbey and Legion star can add futuristic humanoid robot to his repertoire. Another feat: The Englishman speaks excellent German, a language he learned in school, in the film.
Maria Schrader (Unorthodox) directed and with Jan Schomburg co-wrote the Berlin Film Festival winner and Bleecker Street release, which revolves around an archaeologist named Alma (Maren Eggert) who accepts an offer to live with a robot designed to be her perfect life partner.
Schrader and Stevens talked to THR about their collaboration on the film, Stevens’ knowledge of German and his newfound interest in rumba dancing.
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Maria, where did you get the idea for the story?
MARIA SCHRADER It was inspired by a short story written by Emma Braslavsky. She started a story with the exact same premise, that there’s a new generation of robots meant to be the perfect life and love partner. I [was very] intrigued [with the premise], then the rest of the story … Jan and I went very different ways and thought, isn’t it maybe interesting if this creation is maybe even more civilized than the human? The whole idea to create a tale about love between a machine and a human is intriguing, funny and interesting, and of course it asks a lot of questions that we don’t yet have answers for.
How much research went into this script?
SCHRADER The story is set in the future when robots are already part of society. In the middle of this process, we thought, “No, it’s not a science fiction [movie]. Let’s take a step back and set it in our time, and the protagonist is a person like you and me today.” She has no more knowledge about the future of robots or machines. The only future element in this whole thing is Tom [Stevens’ robot character] and the company who presented this new robot. I went to the university in Berlin where they also work on a humanoid robot, and I’ve read a lot of research. I presented them with the idea of Tom and what he’s able to do, and they said, “Honestly, this is light-years away.” I have to admit I was relieved.
Dan, what drew you to this project?
DAN STEVENS It was the tone that Maria has been talking about — it’s such a charming combination of great philosophy and great comedy, which is my happy place. It’s lovely when comedy is able to be a playground for that stuff. I was moved by the script and could see great potential for physical comedy — and also the opportunity to work in German, which I hadn’t done for 13 years.
Maria, why did you want to cast an actor for this role who wasn’t German?
SCHRADER It was supposed to be a German film, and so I thought, since we said goodbye to all the future elements and we were already talking about Tom [having] very strange eyes and all of that … It’s just this agreement, we say, “Hey, here’s Dan Stevens and he is a robot.” You as an audience have to accept it. This is fiction, this is the story we are telling you, and you buy it or not. I thought it’s much easier for a German audience to go into this agreement if this isn’t a primetime German actor that they’ve just seen yesterday in a different part. I thought it’s interesting if we have an actor from abroad, who’s not used to the German audience and maybe also [can] bring some foreign element in the language, even though Dan’s German is really close to perfect. Every native German speaker would have had a hard time because it’s a very educated German — it’s very complicated. And Dan did it fabulously.
STEVENS It’s almost a character type in itself, and we’ve seen it in different genres of film, whether it’s an ice age man brought to life or someone from out of this world. Often the comedy there comes from them getting it wrong. In our film, it’s almost like the comedy comes from Tom getting it right. He says everything so correctly in one sense that it’s totally wrong for the situation. I knew what perfection would look like with that. It’s a wonderfully expressive language — you’re able to convey everything from human emotion to something extremely specific and technical.
You studied German in high school, right?
STEVENS Yes, and a little bit of the literature in university. German is probably my strongest language, but I’ve always enjoyed getting into the words of other languages and the ways of expressing things. And a language is a bit like programming. I found when working on set, it was like switching a certain part of my brain and trying to stay in there all day. I think by the end, Maria, I was a little better than when I started, but I certainly started to think in German and even dream in German, which was weird.
Maria, were you surprised by Dan’s command of the language?
SCHRADER I knew that he spoke German because Dan shot a movie 13 years ago and I had seen it. He also did some German interviews. As a director, [seeing] the actor’s interviews is sometimes more interesting than looking at all their works. I’ve looked at Legion and The Guest, and both had drawn me to ask him to join this project because I saw this kind of precision in acting. Specifically in The Guest, I think his character has a second agenda, and I almost felt I can recognize Tom. [In his interviews,] he’s very good in German and very charming, but I mean — please don’t feel hurt, Dan — he wasn’t at the heights of Tom, but I was very sure that he would get there … Tom has a slice of an accent, but he’s brilliant in his language. He’s never struggling with words, and he can do the same with Korean and French. He’s miles ahead and speaks every language, and that’s frightening, but we have to deliver a certain degree of perfection there. I remember our first meeting. It was charming by the end because I think you thought I auditioned you, and I thought that [Stevens was thinking] about whether it’s worth it to come over to Berlin. We were both in this insecure position, like, “Who is asking who now?”
STEVENS I was worried it was a German test. I was worried I was going to get a score at the end of our conversation, like, “86 percent in this conversation!”
SCHRADER I asked him, “Do you think you can get there? You’ve read the script, and it has to be fast and it has to be just perfect. Do you think you can get there?” And he said yes. I knew I could trust him with that.
What were some of the challenges?
STEVENS Learning to dance the rumba. It’s an incredibly difficult dance, but a very useful dance to be learning for Tom. And I think I’m right, Maria, that you chose it deliberately because of its precision. I had this world champion rumba teacher; his position, his posture and the way he moved was quite inspiring for some of Tom’s movements. All of the time I spent at the dance studio, I was either learning the rumba for Tom or just thinking about how Tom was going to move, but a lot of it stemmed from those rumba sessions.
SCHRADER During writing, it was important to us to come up with a story that is more than just a funny rom-com. The system of a rom-com — how it functions, with the big obstacle and then everyone wants them to come together, and at the end, they of course have to come together — was, thank God, already disturbed and a bit more complicated here. Because throughout the story, you’re not really sure — at least I wasn’t really sure — if I wished for Alma to come together with Tom, even though during writing, I very much wished for Tom to become a character we fall in love with. It’s all charming and funny, but at the end of the day, we are looking at the concept of a thing you can buy to have in your apartment and substitute as human. This is the whole concept, and you can look at it as something very scary or something that at least fundamentally will change society.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
This story first appeared in a December stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
