Diane Kruger Helps Revolutionize Spy Genre In Female-Driven ‘The 355’

Diane Kruger speaks three languages fluently—English, French and her native German—and she gets the opportunity to converse in each at various points in the female-driven international spy action thriller The 355.

Best known for her turns in Inglourious Basterds, Into The Fade and FX’s border crime drama The Bridge, the beguiling actress joins Jessica Chastain, Penelope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o and Bingbing Fan, in headlining the film.

The espionage thriller is the brainchild of Chastain, who saw a dearth of female action heroes in the spy genre and wanted to correct that oversight. The 355, taken from a code name for an anonymous female spy during the Revolutionary War, is a big budget, globetrotting action picture from Universal Pictures, the studio behind the successful Bourne franchise. It is written and directed by veteran action filmmaker Simon Kinberg (writer/director/producer of Dark Phoenix and writer/director of the X-Men films) and co-written by Theresa Rebeck (NBC’s Smash).

Kruger recently had given birth to her first child with partner Norman Reedus when she got the call from Chastain and Kinberg to join The 355 cast. Originally, her character Marie was written as French spy, but the part was tailored for Kruger when she joined the cast. Initially, Marie is at odds with Chastain’s Mace, a CIA operative who, along with her partner/boyfriend Nick (Sebastian Stan, Avengers: Endgame) is on a mission to intercept a device that is capable of disrupting communications with global consequences. When their mission fails, Mace and Marie must join forces to track down the device which is whisked off to various locations before turning up in Shanghai, where it is going up for auction to the highest bidder on the black market. The spy duo is aided by a tech-savvy MI6 agent (Nyong’o) and a Colombian psychologist (Cruz) with no formal spy training.

The action takes the heroines from the streets of Paris to a Moroccan marketplace to a sophisticated auction house in Shanghai, where they encounter a mysterious auctioneer (Fan), who has been tracking their moves and holds the key in securing the device and saving the world from potential destruction.

Besides utilizing her language skills, Kruger, who once played the fleet-launching beauty Helen in Troy, also got a chance to push her physical capability to its limit. Dressed in pink, the actress spoke via Zoom about being part of this groundbreaking female spy action movie.

Universal Pictures’ The 355 opens in theaters Friday, Jan. 7.

Angela Dawson: How did you get involved with this project?

Diane Kruger: To be honest, it was kind of random. I’ve known Jessica (Chastain) for years, just being in the industry. I had just had a baby so I was just beginning to see what was out there that would make me want to come back to work. They called me out of the blue—Simon (Kinberg) and Jessica—to tell me about this project. It felt a little bit like kismet because it required such a physical aspect after a year-and-a-half of being pregnant and giving birth I was, like, maybe I can do this. Maybe I can get back into shape and back into the game. It’s all girls and it’s in Europe—all the things I thought would work. And it did. Jessica really delivered on all those things. She helped me and developed this character around me. Originally, she was going to be French and we made it German. She allowed me to bring so many German things I thought would be cool to the character. We all had equal pay and the same trailers, and the cast was very attractive to me, of course.

Dawson: You speak English, German and French in the film, and you’re fluent in real life. Do you speak other languages?

Kruger: I don’t. I took Latin in school but that hasn’t helped me much in life.

Dawson: Did your co-star Penelope Cruz teach you some Spanish?

Kruger: It’s weird, because of Latin, I understand a lot of Italian but, for whatever reason, Spanish isn’t that easy for me.

Dawson: You’ve done action in other roles, but did you have any special training for The 355?

Kruger: I’ve done bits (of action) in films—mostly running and maybe jumping off something. A real, pure action movie I’ve never done so this required a lot of preparation—not to get a six-pack—but gun training and fight coordination and learning the big fight scenes. It’s like learning a dance. It takes a long time because you have to be extremely precise. You don’t want to really hurt someone. It was really fun but I’m really terrible with guns. That probably took me the longest because I really wanted to be able to change the magazine. It’s supposed to look like I’ve done it a thousand times but it’s just not my thing. That took the longest to learn, strangely.

Dawson: It isn’t just a group of women playing roles that would typically be played by men. Your femininity is integral to your characters’ success in carrying out their tasks.

Kruger: That’s definitely one of the reasons I wanted to be part of this. It didn’t feel like it was a movie about, “Ha, look what we can do.” I’ve played a couple of spies in my life and I’ve met a few real-life spies. It is such a particular job. This, of course, is an entertaining movie. We’re not going into the specifics of what everyday life entails for a spy but, being a woman in this world, that is very male, is at time such a huge advantage and sometimes more dangerous because you’re a woman. Women that find a calling to do this are truly extraordinary people. The ones I’ve met are exceptional with so many different layers that it’s hard for me to explain. It felt like even though this is an entertaining film, it’s really part of the script. Maybe it’s because Jessica herself was in Zero Dark Thirty, she had an understanding of what it was like to do. I feel like she really empowered us girls where we could really kick ass.

Dawson: Did you already know how to ride a motorcycle before this film? That’s you on the motorcycle during the chase through the market with Jessica, right?

Kruger: Some of it. Not when the character was weaving through people; I didn’t want to kill anyone. I do ride motorcycles. I used to, anyway. A lot less now that I have a kid. But it did feel good to use that (skill) in a movie and feel comfortable on it because it’s not so easy.

Dawson: How did you spend your holidays?

Kruger: It was very quiet. We canceled everything. It was nice to just be us. We were hoping to see family we hadn’t seen in a while in Copenhagen. It just didn’t feel right.

Dawson: Is Swimming With Sharks TV series you filmed due to premiere soon?

Kruger: I think so. We shot that also during the pandemic. It’s been delayed and then we finished it so I’m assuming it will be coming out this year.

Dawson: What else do you have on the horizon?

Kruger: We’re leaving this Saturday for Poland. I’m shooting a film there called Joika, which is a true story about the first American woman to get into the Bolshoi Ballet. I play her teacher so I’ve been doing a lot of ballet and a lot of Russian.

Dawson: You were a ballet dancer when you were younger, right?

Kruger: Yeah, and I’ve been wanting to do a film about it for forever. Obviously, I can’t dance like that anymore but this young American girl called Talia Ryder is playing Joy Womack who this story is based on, and she’s been training every day for the past six months. She’s just amazing.