It was the summer of 2019 in the lobby of London's Soho Hotel. Helena Zengel, a then-11-year-old German actress with a still-shaky command of English, was meeting British director Paul Greengrass, who was looking to cast the second lead, alongside Tom Hanks, in his new Western News of the World, which Universal is set to open Dec.
25. Zengel had to act out a scene where Hanks' Captain Kidd character, a Civil War veteran, rescues Johanna, who had been raised by the Native American Kiowa tribe that had kidnapped her and killed her family.
Helena's mother, Anna, stood in for Hanks. "It was really funny because I had to bite Mama and scream at her," Zengel recalls.
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