Arthouse Cinema’s Favorite Leading Man Franz Rogowski is Also One of Film’s Great Wearers of Clothes

“I was actually uncertain about the costume,” Franz Rogowski says, regarding the clothes he had to wear for Andrea Arnold’s Bird, the British auteur’s magical new film. “Because the brown and beige colors in combination with wool, and just the tone, the sandals,” he says, in a video call from the camper van he sometimes calls home. “Somehow, it was all leaning towards… almost a perverted camper.”

Over the last few years, in such arthouse hits as Ira Sachs’ Passages and Sebastian Meise’s Great Freedom, Rogowski has established himself as one of cinema’s most compelling actors. In Bird, a magical-realist council-estate fable, he plays the mysterious title character, who swoops into the bleak, chaotic life of 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) and stands with her as she attempts to overcome the realities of her circumstances, including her charismatic if unreliable father Bug (Barry Keoghan). Bird is a return to home turf for Arnold, after a string of projects shot in the U.S., including the acclaimed American Honey and TV shows like Big Little Lies. And her excellent cast meets her there—with Rogowski adding another memorable, unpindownable character to his arsenal.

“The motivation of every character is on the page [of a script],” Rogowski says. “But then if you look at yourself or your friends and how messy they are and how chaotic your life sometimes becomes, you realize that you need things to be a bit less obvious and less understandable in order to create something that has a dignity. I think dignity is very related also to the place where you can have a secret and still exist.”

Still, Rogowski says the costumes for Bird baffled him initially. “Me being almost 40, confronting this girl that is a stranger to me, in these clothes and this skirt, on the meadow, and she’s from a rough neighborhood, I wasn’t sure. ‘What are they doing with me? How am I going to defend this costume? How am I not going to be somehow intimidating for Nykiya?’”

For all its magical inclinations, Bird is also a very grounded story about children raising children, of economic and emotional squalor, of the cycles of family trauma and the small moments of beauty that can make life survivable. It’s very much a piece with Arnold’s oeuvre—stories of working class British families caught in cycles of trauma and the defiant youth dreaming of a way out.