Golden Globe nominee Helena Zengel was catapulted to stardom as a child actor in Nora Fingscheidt’s System Crasher and as she moves into her first adult role she has had time to reflect.

“I watched System Crasher the other day and was thinking it’s crazy what such a young child did,” she told Deadline promoting her new series Westend Girl at Seriencamp. “It doesn’t feel like me. I watch it and think she was so young. You start to think about it more and more as you get older.”

Zengel, who won awards for the highly-rated System Crasher aged just 11 and was Golden Globe nominated soon after for Paul Greengrass’ News of the World opposite Tom Hanks, is feeling particularly reflective as both she and her character in Westend Girl enter adulthood.

Westend Girl, which had a glitzy premiere in Cologne last night, follows Ronja, who has grown up leading a sheltered lifestyle with wealthy parents but as she turns 18 finds out they have been running a drug ring. Suddenly she is thrust into a game whose rules she hasn’t yet learned, with police breathing down her neck.

Zengel herself turns 18 today and she told Deadline she “loved the chance to do a coming-of-age” show. “I loved being a young woman in a project for the first time,” she added. “I remember I’d just come back from a party when I went to the casting. This role takes me on a journey from being a young child to a woman and this is what I’m doing in my private life. Being in love for the first time, becoming older, making decisions, all grown up stuff. A lot of what the character had to do is what you do when you become 18.”

Zengel said this led to “much more work because you’re not just a child, you’re making a timeline,” but she was up for the challenge. “I thought about where I might be similar to my character and where the differences are,” she explained. “There were many times when I felt like me as Helena would have reacted more confrontationally, and then Ronja is more sensitive.”

Also starring Lucas Gregorowicz and Luise Heyer, Arte and ARD Mediathek’s Westend Girl is in fact based on the true story of a school friend of director Pola Beck.

Beck sent an email to friends asking them the “sorts of stories they wanted to see in the cinema” and the friend responded with a meeting request, before explaining to Beck everything that had happened with her family.

“I said, ‘This is insane, what a diamond of a story’,” added Beck. “I knew her parents from the time, they were so cool, they had sushi and champagne.”

The friend said she wanted to help make the show “to tell people that even if you’ve suffered, even if you’ve gone through hell, you know that something good can come out.”

Beck visited her friend’s father who was still in jail and decided the story had so much material and emotion it required a TV series, not a movie. “It gave us a chance to tell it in layers and have the timeline of the past and the present,” added Beck. “The core of the story that was interesting to me was the dynamics of a family and how you can betray your daughter for such a long time but still be kind of a good family. It didn’t break, it didn’t fall apart. I was wondering how this was possible with all these lies.”

Stefan Schaller, who also directs, said he was taken in by the “non linear structure, these layers.”

“I said, ‘Why don’t we push it even further?’,” he added. “So we made it very subtle having the past and the present be there at the same time, like the past was intruding into the present. For me it was always so interesting that she was trying to save the very people who were pulling her into the abyss.”

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