It’s hard to wake up, to be honest,” says Diane Kruger following the world premiere of her latest film at the Berlin Film Festival. Fresh off a plane from New York, she is heavily jet-lagged, on top of being extremely tired as she combines publicizing The Operative, in which she plays a Mossad agent stationed in Tehran, with her newest role, as a mother to a three-month-old daughter with The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus. “I feel like a bit of a drifter, she adds.

It is a feeling she has had all of her life. Born Diane Heidkrüger in Lower Saxony, her bank-clerk mother sent her on student-exchange programs to improve her English. She dreamt of being a ballerina at London’s Royal Ballet, but it was the Paris fashion scene that embraced her as she forged a successful modeling career – by which time, she had changed her name to Kruger.

Her journey into film was fraught with the difficulty of being stereotyped as a model-turned-actress. One of Kruger’s early films, Frankie in 2005, looked at the short career span of a model and was lambasted by critics who had no sympathy for tall, skinny clothes horses.

Roles in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, the First World War drama Joyeux Noël and in the television series The Bridge followed. Fatih Akin’s In the Fade, however, was her breakthrough. It was her first time performing in her mother tongue and she wowed as a woman seeking justice, then revenge, after her Turkish husband and son die in a terrorist attack.

She won the coveted Best Actress prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, yet the victory was bittersweet: the performance many thought she didn’t have in her came at a time of personal upheaval. “I was in such a dark place,” says Kruger. “I had two really close family deaths that year, I was separating from my partner of 10 years [Joshua Jackson]. There was just a lot of darkness and personal loss. Then the role was very dark.

Winning the prize felt “superficial. But people saw that it was not just another movie for me.” Indeed, the experience was life-changing. “There is something about grief and loss that lets you see how uncompassionate we are as a society, including me. You watch TV and you become so numb to somebody else’s misery.”

The experience of making The Operative, directed by Yuval Adler, and co-starring Martin Freeman, could not have been more different. She was happy, for a start. “It was definitely a special experience of being pregnant when filming. It will always be a special movie because of that; she is in every scene.” She jokes that motherhood is her most important role, yet: “Let’s not fuck that one up.”

She enjoyed playing a spy and even did some Mossad training to prepare. “One of the things that helped me most – at least it got my heart beating – was they made me a fake passport with a fake identity and I had to get through customs with it.”

She felt nervous as she checked in on her flight and headed through security at Tel Aviv airport. “It put things into perspective. What would I feel like if I had to go to Iran right now, and they find out I’m Israeli? Oh my God! Definitely dead.”

After she had passed security, Mossad agents escorted her back out again. She is unsure whether they had arranged the mission so she couldn’t fail, but the fact that they could arrange it set her mind racing. “Even if it was fake, how could they set that up with an international airport? We went through more back alleys and back entrances than I have ever seen in my life.”

Her other tasks included persuading an apartment owner to let her in to stand on their balcony and looking at old pictures to identify the right person when they walked into a room. “There was actually a big case where [Mossad] killed the wrong guy,” she says referring to the 1973 Lillehammer affair.

It is not how she expected the spy experience to be. “I always thought it must be so cool to be James Bond,” she says. “But the realities of being a spy are closer to what we did. It’s cool, but I don’t dream about it anymore.

None of it came naturally to her. “I’m very introverted, in my real life, to a fault,” she claims. “I think I can appear cold or standoffish. I really have to force myself to be outgoing. Acting has, for me, been the opportunity to identify with someone else, be someone else.”

Next, Kruger will be seen in Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy, Justin Kelly’s film about a literary hoax, in which she plays a character based on Asia Argento, who adapted one of LeRoy’s books for the screen. And she is rumored to be reuniting with Akin to play Marlene Dietrich in a four-part television series about the legendary German actress who continually reinvented herself. Yet Kruger is keeping mum. “I’m still on hiatus,” she says. “I think I’ll start looking at roles in the summer.”

The Operative begins in a fairly formulaic manner, but surprises when Kruger’s character lands in Tehran, where she starts to experience a sense of belonging that she hasn’t felt elsewhere. “I really identified with that,” says Kruger.

“I found her interesting for that reason, the feeling of belonging to something, doing something in your life that is for a cause higher than you are. That’s something I didn’t expect coming to Israel. I really feel like the Jewish people feel very strongly about being Jewish and protecting Israel and doing everything to protect their country, which I find admirable.”

She has always been searching for a home, she says. “When I was younger, I felt I didn’t belong anywhere. Maybe a lot of people feel that way, but living abroad for most of my life, when I started to come home, I started to feel like a stranger. There is an uncertainty to that, which, now I am older, I have come to relish.”