Antje Traue

The thing to watch in Man of Steel (2013) is how little Antje Traue does. Michael Shannon's Zod shouts, and the city falls down around him, and Faora-Ul stands slightly behind, waits, and then moves only as far as the job requires. We wrote at the time that she fights with economy and seems to enjoy it, and that is still the right description: she is a soldier who finds the work pleasant. In a film that mistakes volume for seriousness she is the one performer who understood that the frightening thing is calm. We liked her more than anything in the last hour, and we liked the last hour very little.

The stillness is trained. She was an artistic gymnast from six, and at sixteen she was on stage in a touring hip-hop musical that took her across Europe and to New York. Her first screen part came in a German television film in 2000, and German film and television kept her for most of the decade. The turn was Pandorum (2009), Christian Alvart's science fiction thriller, in which she played Nadia opposite Ben Foster and was seen, for the first time, by people who did not speak German. Zack Snyder's Faora followed four years later, and after it came Seventh Son (2014) as Bony Lizzie, Woman in Gold (2015) as Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the German time-travel series Dark (2017–2020), in which she played Agnes Nielsen. She was still working in 2025, with Fall for Me.

What she does well is the contained woman: the engineered soldier, the witch, the person who has decided and will not be talked out of it. She has said of Faora that she had to empty her mind of doubts in order to become fearless, because the character has a one-track mind and is trained to attack, and the four months of training and dieting she put in are visible in how the part moves. What she is rarely given is a second thing to play once the first is established. The Flash (2023) is the plain example. Zod lands in a flat desert under a grey sky, Shannon gives a slower and sadder version of the earlier performance, and Traue, as we said, gets less than that: she is there to be recognised and then to be in the fight.

That is a complaint about the films rather than the actor. The English-language pictures tend to keep her in the second row and let the costume do the acting; the lead parts have mostly been at home, in German. Someone should write her a part in which the stillness has to break. Until then, Man of Steel is the one to watch, and watch her rather than the buildings.