Tim Fehlbaum’s tense drama “September 5” is tightly focused on a group of real-life male American journalists responding to the terrorist attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich. But one of the most essential characters in the film is fictional. She’s a woman. She’s German. And she’s not a journalist.
Marianne Gebhardt, played by Leonie Benesch, is a translator in the ABC Sports office during the attack by the Palestinian militant organization Black September. Eleven members of the Israeli team were murdered by the terrorists or killed in a failed rescue attempt. As journalists Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard), Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) and Jim McKay (in archival footage woven into the film) struggle to understand what is happening and to communicate it to the world, Gebhardt is an indispensable part of the team as the one person in the room who speaks German.
But Benesch is equally vital as the conscience of Germany itself. “That was the first time the Olympics were held in Germany after Hitler,” she said of the Games 27 years after the end of World War II. “They were meant to be a little bit of a publicity makeover for Germany to go, ‘Look at us. We’ve moved on. We are not the 1936-to-1945 country anymore. We are now the new Germany.’ And then, for that to happen on German soil…”
That realization — that the Olympics meant to restore the country’s reputation instead played host to an attack on Jews — hangs in the air in “September 5,” particularly when Benesch is on screen. Her presence and her understated performance make the film about a lot more than just how some journalists covered a big story.
“It’s a clever layer to the film,” Benesch said. “It gives the added layer of that German perspective on this tragedy that is unfolding.”
Benesch, 33, said she was raised at a time when Germans were asked to acknowledge the country’s past crimes. That was one reason she learned to speak English without a German accent: “In 2013, when I moved to London, I didn’t want to be recognized as a German,” she shared. “I wanted to master the skill of sounding like someone not from there.” (She sounds thoroughly British.)
She made that move to London a few years after acting in her first film, Michael Haneke’s chilling, Oscar-nominated “The White Ribbon,” kicking off her career while still in her teens with a brilliant director and top-flight production. The actress remembers people telling her, “I know this is your first film, but don’t get used to this.” She laughed. “I didn’t know what that meant until I was on some other films, and I realized, Oh, they were right.”
She worked steadily on film and television, including three episodes of “The Crown” as Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark, but her visibility got a boost in 2023 when she starred in “The Teachers’ Lounge,” a German film that was nominated for the Best International Feature Film Oscar. (It didn’t hurt that the film’s ubiquitous image was one of Benesch’s character, mouth wide open and screaming.)
In its aftermath, she was sent the script for “September 5,” which she said she found “absolutely thrilling. I knew that the tragedy had happened, and I knew the very famous image of the masked man on a balcony. But I didn’t know it was 22 hours of live news reporting by a bunch of sports journalists. I had no idea of the extent to which German authorities failed or the extent to which that day had an impact on the way we produce and consume breaking news today.”
Because her character was an outsider among the ABC Sports crew, Benesch and Fehlbaum decided she should skip the film’s table read and meet the rest of the cast on the first day of shooting. “We liked the idea of me being thrown into that group in a way that mirrors how Marianne was thrown into the control room that’s not her turf,” Benesch said. “She’s an outsider in that men’s newsroom, so I met everyone on the first day of filming.”
That filming took place in small rooms that duplicated the look of the real ABC Sports offices and purposely didn’t have any removable walls or ceilings to make filming more comfortable. “They built the thing as small and claustrophobic as it was and filled it with loads and loads of people and smoke,” she said. “They were not easy days, and Tim loves to do very long takes and to do them again and again and again. I think if no one told him to go home, he would just move in.”
Benesch initially figured that becoming a convincing translator would be her toughest job, but she learned otherwise by the time she got to one of her last scenes, in which Marianne goes to the airport where the hostages are all killed, returns to the studio and tries to come to terms with what has happened.
“I remember being most nervous about the translating,” she said. “But the most complicated thing was that final scene about the question of German guilt. I was very concerned with getting the tone right. Being a German and having been raised with the culture of trying to take responsibility for what the country has done, I did not want that to be a moment of self-pity. We discussed it a lot. That ended up being the trickiest part, which I didn’t expect going into it.”
This story first appeared in the Awards Preview issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
