A ‘Homeland’ Spy Suddenly Pivots

NEW YORK — In fall 2016, German actress Nina Hoss followed the U.S. presidential campaign up close: She was in New York, shooting the sixth season of “Homeland,” in which she played a fan favorite, intelligence agent Astrid. It was time to go home to Berlin, where she was scheduled to return to theater; she was considering performing “The Human Voice,” Jean Cocteau’s 1930 monologue that consists entirely of a woman pleading on the phone. But the election of Donald Trump changed Hoss’ plans.

“I thought, I can’t really spend three months, now, with a character who wants to get her lover back with all the different ways a woman has,” she said during a visit to Brooklyn last fall. In barely accented English, she added, “God, who wants to see that?”

The election brought about “a strong shift” in her thinking, she said: “I heard a lot of New Yorkers say, ‘How could they do that to us?’ — the people who voted for Trump. But I thought, it’s not that easy, you know? They must be in a state of desperation. I ask myself, am I political enough? Don’t we all have to get involved more? I wanted to ask myself and the audience: What happened, and what are we going to do now?”

So Hoss made the kind of hairpin turn the new world order demanded. She and German director Thomas Ostermeier came up with a new work, “Returning to Reims,” for the prestigious Schaubühne Theater in Berlin. The production, which had its premiere in Manchester, England, last July, then moved to Berlin, is now beingpresented in English at St. Ann’s Warehouse, where it opens Sunday for a run that ends on Feb. 25.

The play is based on French philosopher Didier Eribon’s 2009 memoir about growing up gay and intellectual in a homophobic working-class family that went from voting communist to supporting the far-right National Front. (Some of the themes will be familiar to readers of J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy.”) The book was a best seller in Germany, where it bitterly resonated in the new political climate.

“I think it has to do with the fact that Germans are, due to our terrible history, very sensitive to developments on the new right,” Ostermeier said by telephone from Berlin. “They’re desperately looking for explanations to understand that phenomenon.”

There was just one hitch in moving the story to the stage: It had no role for Hoss. So she and Ostermeier — whose explosive “Richard III” was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in October — devised a radical adaptation.

In the play, Hoss, 42, takes center stage as an unnamed actress recording the voice-over for a documentary based on Eribon’s book. About 45 minutes in, the narrator starts questioning the decisions of the film’s director (played by Bush Moukarzel), who has been hovering in the sound booth. The book; the fake movie (which includes footage of Eribon chatting with his mother, filmed by Ostermeier and Sébastien Dupouey); and Hoss’ own life merge as she brings her father, Willi Hoss, into the story.

“Everybody who read the Eribon book ended up talking about their own family, background or history, so I thought it might be a good idea to make that fruitful in the production,” Ostermeier said. “Nina was happy to do it, even though it took her a lot of work and energy.”

A key difference between Eribon’s upbringing and Nina Hoss’ is that his was miserable, and hers decidedly less so.

“I had a fantastic childhood,” she said. “I had two parents who had a lot of belief in humanity and people, and always fought with enthusiasm — never for themselves but always in a group.” Her father started as a welder and trade unionist, then was elected to Germany’s parliament and was a founder of the Green Party. Her mother, Heidemarie Hoss-Rohweder, ran a theater company.

In the play, Hoss makes this activism come to life by showing pictures and home videos of her father, including some from trips he made to help save the Brazilian Amazon’s rain forest. In a recent telephone conversation, Hoss described spending several summers there as a teenager, watching her father take measurements for pipes or wells. Eventually, though, she took her mother’s route and attended drama school. Her association with Ostermeier dates to 1999, and “Returning to Reims” is their third collaboration at the Schaubühne, following Yasmina Reza’s dark comedy “Bella Figura” and a revival of Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes.”

In a move indicative of Hoss’ process, a mix of research and intuition, she tweaked her take on the wicked Regina Giddens nightly in “The Little Foxes.”

“Sometimes I felt the world is really mean to her,” Hoss said with a chuckle — she laughs a lot in conversation, as if happy to be taken on a ride by her own quicksilver mind. “Her brothers treat her horribly, so she becomes a horrible person. Other nights, she’s like the men: She just wants it the way she wants it, and that’s horrifying. Women can be horrible, too, and they should be allowed.”

One of Hoss’ greatest strengths as an actor is a deceiving calm that somehow suggests both confidence and vulnerability. “Even when she whispers, she captures the audience,” Eribon said by telephone. Early in “Returning to Reims,” he said, “she speaks low to herself, rehearsing the reading, yet we’re fascinated.”

This quality allows Hoss’ presence, at once cryptic and warm, to resonate even in small roles. It was such a supporting part, in fact, that led to “Homeland.” That series’ showrunner, Alex Gansa, first spotted her alongside Philip Seymour Hoffman in the spy thriller “A Most Wanted Man” (2014), then confirmed his hunch by watching her carry the period melodrama “Phoenix” (2015), and cold-called her.

“One of the things Nina loved about Astrid, more than anything, is that she had a sense of humor,” Gansa said by telephone. “We spent a lot of time in the writers’ room giving her that color because she can be so wry and funny in the most understated way. Being grown-up never seemed so sexy.” The “Homeland” job has opened doors for Hoss, who recalled, with a smidgen of incredulity, being recognized by passers-by in New York. Because the Schaubühne runs on a time-consuming repertory model, with yearlong commitments, she’s decided to put the stage aside for a while after this summer, and focus on her screen career.

“I’ve done theater for a very long time,” Hoss said, “and I feel more and more these two systems just don’t work with each other, especially if I want to work in the U.S. So now I’m available.” She laughed, again. “But I’m always going back to theater, I know that.”