Every time Rosamund Pike has boarded a plane recently, she has “tried to imagine what it would take to stand up and tell the passengers: ‘This is a hijack situation.’ It makes me go hot, just the thought.”

The thought was part of the preparation for her latest role in the film Entebbe, out on 11 May, which recounts the dramatic seizure of an Air France jet travelling from Tel Aviv to Paris in 1976, a terrorist act intended to highlight the Palestinian cause.

Pike plays Brigitte Kuhlmann, a 29-year-old leftist German radical who, along with a male comrade from the Revolutionary Cells – a splinter group of the Red Army Faction – and two Palestinians, held hostage 248 passengers and diverted the plane to Uganda.

“There was such a deficit of information on Brigitte,” says Pike. “Then one day, marking the 40th anniversary of her death, an ex-boyfriend suddenly posted a picture of her on Facebook, aged 22; this sweet, innocent, auburn-haired, sunkissed, slightly hippy summer babe. Which made me think: ‘OK, how did this person become this person?’”

In the film, Pike holds heated political debates in German with her co-star, Daniel Brühl, who plays Kuhlmann’s partner, Wilfried Böse. “I don’t have a command of the language at all, so it’s just so funny that the only things I can say in German are these very in-depth political statements in the discussions we have.

Daniel Brühl and Rosamund Pike in Entebbe. Photograph: Allstar/Working Title Films

“Daniel Brühl is an actor I’ve admired for a long time, and to be playing a scene in German with him, going with full intensity back and forth, with me in command of this subtle dialogue, was just so cool. In reality I can’t even ask the way to the bus station in German.”

Kuhlmann was part of a generation of young Germans in the 1960s and 70s driven by the wish to avenge either the Nazi crimes of the older generations – their parents and grandparents – or their apparent indifference to the Holocaust. As the ideological glue that has drawn the terrorists together begins to come unstuck, one of the Palestinians – members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – says to the Germans: “You’re here because you hate your country. I’m here because I love mine.”

“I was very aware that the Palestinians’ faultline of belief and radicalism is purer than that of the Germans’, which comes from a negative place,” Pike says.

“There’s true zealous, anarchist spirit in [Kuhlmann] as well as the fervent desire to divorce yourself from any sense of inherited unearned guilt from Nazism. And I really feel it. Having researched it, I really feel the German youth of the 1960s and 70s, they were burdened with this in a way that we can’t even imagine. Even today, you see it in Germans’ faces if you go into that conversation. You feel there’s a temperature change that takes place.”

What Pike did struggle with in Entebbe was the “naivety” of her character’s commitment to the cause. “To be so definitive in their beliefs that they must align themselves with everything that was anti-capitalist, to the extent that you blame Israel as the modern example of the fascist state and you go against it with all your might, hijacking a plane largely of Israeli passengers and you hold Jews hostage again. It seems insane.”

One scene shows Brühl in conversation with a woman who was incarcerated in Auschwitz and seems numbed that she finds herself imprisoned by Germans again. The fact that this time they are leftwing radicals makes little difference.

Entebbe is a challenging and unglamorous role for Pike, an actor best known for her role in the Bond film Die Another Day as well as her brilliant facility with period English blondes, whether feisty (A United Kingdom), catty (An Education), or badly treated (Pride and Prejudice).

“I’m in a very unusual position,” she says, “and one that I do not take for granted, whereby I have some very interesting opportunities. I’m looking for things that are inspiring, provocative, that make me think. I’ve been learning a huge amount.”

Next up she plays the war reporter Marie Colvin, and then the pioneering physicist and chemist Marie Curie. She has had tutorials in history, the Middle East, chemistry and physics, she says, as well as intense discussions with the family of Colvin, who was killed covering the siege of Homs in Syria in 2012.

“The really moving privilege has been getting to know [her], someone I will never meet – and really loving her,” says Pike. “It’s really strange and it’s quite emotional.

“We didn’t know it would be the case when we started that people would be searching for great [female] role models. But in a climate of superheroes, these are real superheroes.”