Helena Zengel

Helena Zengel is a German actress from Berlin who began acting at five in a music video for the band Abby. Her first main film role came at eight in Die Tochter, which screened at the Berlinale in 2017, and she had small parts in a German TV series. She played the lead in Nora Fingscheidt's System Crasher (2019), earning the German Film Prize for Best Actress in 2020. After that film won international awards, she was cast in her first international production, the Western News of the World (2020), directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Tom Hanks. Her performance as a German orphan raised by the Kiowa brought Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. She appeared in A Christmas No. 1 (2021), then took a leading role in Transamazonia (2024) and starred in the fantasy adventure The Legend of Ochi (2025).