‘Tin Drum’ actor snares role in Lee’s latest

CINEPHILES may recognize the intense, blue-eyed actor playing a tormented research doctor in Spike Lee’s new film, “She Hate Me,” which opens Wednesday. The thespian in question is none other than David Bennent, who starred 25 years ago as the diminutive Oskar in Volker Schlondorff’s Oscar-winning German film “The Tin Drum.”

Bennent was all of 12 when he played Oskar, a role that required him to participate in a sex scene. Controversy ensued. The German press, Bennent says, attacked his parents for allowing him to play the role. Even as late as 1997, a fundamentalist group in Oklahoma tried to get the film banned as child pornography. “We had to say that we didn’t have sex really,” says the 37-year-old Swiss-born actor. “That was so funny.”

Playing such a demanding role at age 12 wasn’t difficult for Bennent, whose father is actor Heinz Bennent (“The Last Metro”).

“My parents were very open.... So when I read the book for the first time, I had many questions and my parents answered them without telling stories or lying, but just telling the truth.”

Bennent stepped back from acting after the film. “I had to go back to school and my normal childhood life,” he says. “Then at the age of 17 I quit school and started to be an actor in the theater. I was a year at the Comedie-Francaise and I was with Peter Brooks’ company for seven years.”

For the past three years, he’s been treading the boards in Berlin.

“She Hate Me” is one of his few films since Ridley Scott’s 1985 fantasy, “Legend.” Bennent had met with Lee in Paris and Berlin on another project when “suddenly he phoned me for ‘She Hate Me.’ At that time, I could free myself from the theater and then I could go to New York and shoot. I had some time to prepare myself and to work a little bit more on my English.”

Bennent is open to doing more films, but, he adds, “In Germany, films aren’t so interesting. So I prefer to wait until something very special comes along, like with Spike Lee or Ridley Scott.”

-- Susan King