Armin Mueller-Stahl was up for the role of his life, and he had four big problems. He barely knew English. He wasn't Dustin Hoffman. He wasn't Jewish. And he was German.
Director Barry Levinson was casting the lead of "Avalon" - the role of Sam Krichinsky, the Jewish grandfather at the head of the Baltimore clan based on Levinson's own immigrant family. The choice came down to Hoffman and Mueller-Stahl, the relative unknown who had recently made his debut as a Hollywood star in Costa-Gavras's "Music Box," playing the Hungarian-American Mike Laszlo, whose quiet Chicago life is split open by the revelation that he was a vicious war criminal.Mueller-Stahl was summoned to Levinson's Fifth Avenue office. "I'm not worried at all about the difficult scenes," the director said. "I'm worried about the scenes with the other actors. I have a particular rhythm I need in this film. How will you handle that?"
"Just like I've done all my other roles," Mueller-Stahl replied.
"Yes," Levinson said, "but the accent?"
Mueller-Stahl's heart was pounding; his fear, he suspected, was plastered all over his face. His crystal blue eyes sparkled as he mustered a gentle smile of false confidence.
"Either the story is good," he said, "and the viewer will forget the accent after the first sentence because he's sucked into the story, or the story is lousy, and then the finest accent won't help."
Levinson nodded and said nothing. There was another inconclusive meeting, and finally Mueller-Stahl got a three-word message at his hotel: "Let's do it."
The next day Mueller-Stahl's agent told him, "You are now a star in America." He was, after a long struggle with English, Mike Laszlo, a Hungarian-American hiding a dark and horrible past. He was, after Yiddish accent lessons that lasted six hours a day, Sam Krichinsky, a Jewish immigrant trying to fit into the New World.
And now Armin Mueller-Stahl is the title character in "Utz," an upcoming film from the Bruce Chatwin novel, the tale of a German-born Czechoslovak who escapes from communist tyranny by withdrawing into an obsession with porcelain. Mueller-Stahl also is a German immigrant New York taxi driver in Jim Jarmusch's "Night on Earth," which opens this week, a series of scenes about cabbies around the world.
Always outsiders, always struggling with the language, Mueller-Stahl's characters inhabit the spaces between accepted worlds. They can be rumpled or orderly, charming or snippy, but they all emerge from behind the walrus mustache as lonely men separated from the certainties of life. With rage and pathos, the confusion of loss and the security of pride, Laszlo, Krichinsky and Utz search for their own place away from the rejections of insiders.
Mueller-Stahl, a trim, muscular 60, is a rarity - a German actor who has won a place in Hollywood without once being cast in the uniform of the Nazi army. Like his characters he is an outsider, a German among Jewish producers in America, an East German who has suddenly become Western Germany's proudest export to Hollywood, a grandson of ethnic Germans who fled from Russia to Germany in 1942. Paradoxically, although he is not Jewish, he is now being typecast in Jewish roles.
Thrown out of East Germany in 1976 by the communist regime, Mueller-Stahl became a major actor in West Germany's dwindling film industry.
The idea of joining the exodus of German filmmakers to Hollywood seemed farfetched to Mueller-Stahl three years ago. He knew only German and Russian. But when he starred in two German-language films that got nominated for the foreign film Oscar - "Colonel Redl" and "Angry Harvest" - he caught the eye of a Los Angeles agent.
Soon, offers started coming in, even though Mueller-Stahl couldn't even read the screenplays. From the start, he had one rule: "I won't play the bad German," he says (though he did, in "Music Box," play a Hungarian allied with bad Germans).
Now he is back in Berlin, staring out his hotel window toward the east. "It's very awful in Germany now," he says. "All this Stasi stuff. The Germans are not my beloved people anymore. The West Germans are taking over East Germany with such arrogance."