Rupert Friend was born to play a Nazi. Maybe it’s the high cheekbones, seemingly cut from granite, the piercing aquamarine eyes, or the slightly haughty mien that can suggest, at a push, an emissary from the master race. Either way, the 26-year-old actor, formerly found in tabloid paparazzi snaps as arm candy for his superstar girlfriend Keira Knightley, or doing solid support in movies such as Pride & Prejudice and Nick Love’s Outlaw, has finally hit paydirt with a truly creepy turn as a Nazi officer in the child-focused Holocaust movie The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.
Here, under blond dye-job and tinted eyebrows, Friend plays the mercurial SS officer Lieutenant Kotler, assigned to the house of child protagonist Bruno (Asa Butterfield). For