People: In the spotlight with “Run Lola Run” – Franka Potente turns 50

A few weeks before her 50th birthday, Franka Potente is a sought-after interview guest in the US media. The Californian-born actress has her iconic role in “Run Lola Run” to thank for this. This was the title of the cult film “Run Lola Run” by director Tom Tykwer that was released in American cinemas 25 years ago. Lead actress Potente is twice as old today.

To mark the 25th anniversary, at the beginning of June, the film returned to US cinemas as a new 4K restoration. The mother of two from Dülmen in North Rhine-Westphalia looks back nostalgically in interviews.

A reporter from the Los Angeles station KTLA wanted to know what makes “Run Lola Run” so timeless. “The film has a fast pace and a fairly simple narrative pattern. You have 20 minutes to save your friend – that has the same energy today as it did 25 years ago,” says Potente. She beams into the camera with long, blonde hair; she had taken off her fiery red Lola hairstyle straight after filming.

Lola runs without training

That was in the summer of 1997. Potente was 23 years old at the time and had already had some film experience. She said at the time that she had already decided on her career choice when she was 15. She studied acting for two years in Munich, and also attended seminars at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute in New York. She played her first leading role in 1995 in the coming-of-age comedy “Nach Fünf im Urwald”. Her breakthrough came with the award-winning action thriller “Run Lola Run”, which was released in Germany in the autumn of 1998.

In it, red-haired Lola (Potente) has twenty minutes to raise 100,000 marks and use it to save her petty criminal friend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). Lola runs off across Berlin in three versions – with lots of speed, techno and digital effects. Each attempt is similar, but small changes always have big consequences.

Of course, Potente had to run a lot during filming, but she hadn’t trained for it. “I hadn’t prepared for it at all,” she told the US industry magazine “Variety” in June. At the time, she also smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. She was simply carried away by the energy on set.

Her hair color was more problematic. Her jet-black hair had to be bleached eight times in a row. She wasn’t allowed to wash her hair during filming because otherwise the red color would have washed out.

There was a spark between the actress and director Tykwer and they became a couple. This was also the start of Potente’s international career. She made her Hollywood debut alongside Johnny Depp in “Blow” (2001), about the rise and fall of cocaine dealer George Jung in the 1970s. Shortly afterwards, she filmed the comedy “Try Seventeen” with “Lord of the Rings” star Elijah Wood. This also led to a romance, but it ended after a few months.

Praise from Hollywood

This was followed by the spy thrillers “The Bourne Identity” (2002) and “The Bourne Supremacy” (2004) with Matt Damon as an agent who has lost his memory and Potente as his lover and savior. “Franka is really a very, very good actress,” Damon said at the time. “She is professional, disciplined and talented. She works very hard, maybe that is actually a German trait.”

In the fall of 2004, she packed her bags to seek her fortune in Los Angeles. After just under a year, she returned to Berlin, but continued filming with international stars. US director Steven Soderbergh put her in front of the camera with Benicio Del Toro in “Che,” about the life of the Cuban revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara.

Two children added

Potente took on the lead role in the biographical drama “Beate Uhse – The Right to Love” (2011) about the sex entrepreneur. That year, the actress, now living in the USA again, became a mother for the first time. In 2012, she married the US actor Derek Richardson, whom she had met while filming an episode of “Dr. House”. A year later, her second daughter was born.

The American-by-choice author wrote her first novel in German, “Gradmählich wird es Tag” (2014). In it, she describes the fate of a man in his late forties who suddenly loses his job and his wife and is looking for answers.

Then she switched behind the camera and presented her feature film debut “Home” as a director in 2021. The setting is the poor American hinterland, to which a man (Jake McLaughlin) returns after 17 years in prison. Oscar winner Kathy Bates plays his sick mother. Long shots bring calm to the independent film. Potente has already proven her ability to keep a rapid pace as the running Lola.