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Sebastian Koch knows how to play innocent, even when he's not on-screen—like the time he was stopped for doing 160 kph in a 100 kph zone. Facing a heavy penalty, Koch convinced the cops that their radar must have been improperly calibrated, because surely his old Citroën could only hit 110, tops. The officers let him off the hook and asked what he did for a living.

"I'm an actor," he said. Both cops burst out laughing.

Koch's recent performances in The Lives of Others (this year's Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film) and in Paul Verhoeven's Black Book have won him international admiration. Sitting at a table in Balthazar (a French-German fusion restaurant on Berlin's tony Kurfürstendamm) debating about what to order, he has a warm, infectious air about him. The dour waitress turns friendly and the interview assumes the character of an easy conversation over lunch. Is Koch's grace genuine, or is he taking us in just as he did the cops?

Maybe it's the latter. In Germany Koch is known for his uncannily realistic portrayals of major—and mostly notorious—historical figures, studying his subjects' flaws and strengths, trying to figure out their inner lives. Becoming Albert Speer, for example, was no easy task: The Third Reich munitions minister was himself a master of illusion.

"Speer built mental rooms in which he was the good Nazi, not as criminal as the others," Koch explains. "In reality he was intimately involved in the workings of the regime, but later he persuaded many that he wasn't. He was very seductive, with his big melancholy eyes."

Koch's own wide-set, almond-shaped brown eyes are similarly instrumental, eliciting sympathy and trust, especially from his female fans. In the soft light of the restaurant, he looks younger than in The Lives of Others, where the lens keeps sharp focus on the harried dissident writer who becomes a political prisoner in his own home.

Sympathy is a surprising quality for Koch's recent role in Black Book. Captain Ludwig Müntze runs the Nazi Security Service in the occupied Netherlands during the war's final year. Realizing that the Nazis are doomed, he falls for a beautiful Dutch Resistance agent, the seductive Jewish singer Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten). Just by accepting the role of a lovable Nazi, Koch risked being charged with moral relativism; realism, however, is how he prefers to think of it. A man gone wrong but not entirely lost seemed likelier than the Nazi demons of cinematic convention.

"Real people aren't purely evil," he says. "It's the conflicts and abysses into which people fall that interest me." He strongly disagrees with Klaus Kinski, the enfant terrible of German cinema, who famously remarked, "You will know a man by his vices, because virtues can be faked."

"It's actually the opposite," Koch insists. "Vices are easy to fake."