Diane Kruger wanted to believe the myth of Hollywood, too

German actress Diane Kruger remembers when she first drove through a Hollywood studio’s gates.

“It was like you see in the movies,” the “Inglourious Basterds” star says. Like others, she wanted to believe the myth about the business: “The whole American Hollywood dream is very much alive in Europe.”

Born in West Germany, Kruger wanted to be a ballerina but a knee injury prompted a change of plans. After a stint in the Royal Ballet School in London, she turned to modeling and then, in 2002, acting.

The glamorous life? Not in the European film industry.

“We don’t have a studio system like what you have here,” Kruger says during a Zoom interview. “Movies are produced through TV channels, especially in France, where you get grants. The rival studio system? We don’t have that, so it feels very different.”

In the new series, “Swimming with Sharks,” she plays a cutthroat studio head who isn’t above barking orders and making demands of everyone in her sight. Cool and calculated, her Joyce Holt, takes on an assistant – played by Kiernan Shipka – who comes across as a potential replacement.

Naturally, Holt’s guard is up and, soon, a game of sorts begins.

Fictitious? Not necessarily, Kruger says.

“I’ve certainly come across executives or producers who haven’t been super pleasant,” she says.

Assistants, Shipka says, are always nice because they’re not worried about the talent. “She’s pretty sweet on the surface,” the “Mad Men” star says of her character. But she wouldn’t telegraph her behind-the-scenes punches to an actress. The game between Shipka’s Lou Simms and Kruger’s Holt is clear initially: “She wants her job,” Shipka says. “That’s what it’s all about…and then it’s not.”

Both actresses say they enjoyed the twists and turns the story takes.

“There was always a layer to peel back in any scene on any given day,” Shipka explains. “There was a ton of fun stuff to put into the scenes and the performances.”

And more than a few deaths to consider. The moral of the story, Shipka says with a laugh, “Never come to Hollywood.”

Unlike Kruger, who didn’t enter the business until she was an adult, Shipka moved to Los Angeles when she was 6 and started working right away.

“I didn’t really know anything else,” she says. “My intro to this kind of world felt paced. It was a gradual introduction and then, all of a sudden, everything shifted.”

Filming “Swimming with Sharks,” Shipka says, gave her a sense of what Kruger initially experienced. “It reignited that sort of magic of studio lots. As familiar as I am with this town, you do a film at Paramount or catch a glimpse of the Hollywood sign and something still happens. There’s a magic to it all.”