Daniel Brühl: Germany’s multilingual acting superstar

Daniel Brühl

“With Daniel I really believe that the audience identifies with him so strongly, that at some point they think what he thinks,” said director Hans Weingarten who worked with him on Das Weisse Rauschen (The White Sound) and Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei (The Edukators).

The audience’s identification is small wonder. Brühl prepares for his roles meticulously. For Das Weisse Rauschen, where he plays a schizophrenic, Brühl insisted on meeting someone with the condition. “That was crucial for me to be able to make the film, because otherwise you always run the danger of just presenting a cliché.”

An actor in the making

Yet Brühl does not have any formal training as an actor. He was, however, involved in acting from an early age. He participated in children’s theater at school and earned his first pocket money at the age of eight on radio plays. “I quickly noticed that I liked doing this as I could use my voice,” he said. Work followed in a dubbing studio and subsequently one of the dubbing actors recommended the teenager to a talent agency.

Age 15, Brühl landed a small part in the TV film Svens Geheimnis (1994) and was infected with the acting bug. Work followed in TV films and series. But his career really took off in January 2002, when he was named Best Newcomer Actor at the Bavarian Film Awards for his performances in Benjamin Quabeck’s No Regrets (Nichts Bereuen, 2001), Hans Weingartner’s The White Sound (Das Weisse Rauschen, 2001) and Zoltan Spirandelli’s Vaya con Dios, 2002. He then topped his achievement at the German Film awards that summer by winning the “Lola” prize for Best Lead Actor in the same three films.

Making it big

Despite the success, Brühl was only really introduced to a wider cinema-going audience in 2003, when he starred in the surprise hit Good Bye Lenin! He plays the role of a young man who tries to keep his fragile mother, who has awoken from a coma, from finding out that the DDR, as she knew it, has disappeared. The film went on to become one of the most successful German films ever and was sold to more than 65 countries abroad.

Brühl then went on to underline his standing as Germany’s hottest acting property by staring in the internationally successful Die Fetten Jahre sind vorbei (the Edukators, 2004), where he plays the role of Jan, who breaks into luxury houses with his friend. They do not steal or vandalize, but rearrange the furniture and leave a message in protest against the capitalist system they view as corrupt and unjust.

Meeting the Queen

The message that Brühl was an actor worth hiring was one that had traveled to England, as he starred along side English stars Judi Dench and Maggie Smith in Ladies in Lavender the same year. His role is quite a contrast to his rebellious character in the Edukators, as he plays a violin-playing Polish seaman who is washed up on the beach of a Cornish seaside village, where he is nursed back to health.

That role meant he even met the Queen, as she was attending the premiere. Brühl received a fax in advance telling him how to behave towards the Queen. “You are not allowed to offer your hand before she offers hers. You have to bow to the Queen and have to say ‘Your Majesty’ after every sentence – all of that I seemed to get wrong. But the Queen talked a lot of nonsense. She talked about Düsseldorf and said it was the premier media city – I left her in that belief. I mean who wants to contradict the Queen?”

Acting in Spanish

More recently, Brühl played the role of a rebel again. Yet this time, the role was in Spanish – his first time acting in his second language. Daniel César Martín Brühl González Domingo was born in Barcelona in June 1978, son of a German father and a Catalan mother. The actor was raised bilingually in Cologne and visited Spain regularly as a child. As a result he speaks fluent Spanish.

Nevertheless, he explains that Salvador was “A huge challenge” and that he took a lot of persuading before he accepted the role as he would normally only speak Spanish at home with his mother. Furthermore, he had to learn Catalan, for which he had his own language coach. In the film Brühl plays the role of Salvador Puig Antich, an anarchist who was one of the last executed under the Franco dictatorship in 1974.

Brühl approached the character with his usual dedication, reading about Salvador, talking to his family and people affected by the dictatorship. “For me it was difficult to play the role just before the execution, because I had to allow myself to think about myself and my own death. That’s when you move into very dark areas and get really scared.”

Now Brühl can no longer wander the streets of cities in Spain without being recognized as “Salvador”. And word of the versatile German actor seems to have made it over to Hollywood too, as he made a brief appearance in the action film The Bourne Ultimatum, where he spoke English.

With his international film appearances, Germany’s “shooting star” is maturing into a multilingual superstar who is making film audiences worldwide stand up and take note. So much so that legendary Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar is said to have cast an eye on the German-Spanish actor. Even cult director Quentin Tarantino is on record praising him.

With the future looking bright for Brühl, surely it is only a matter of time before he meets the Queen again. Perhaps this time she will bow to his success. Or perhaps he will simply tell her that his home city, Cologne, is the media capital of Germany.

Alex Handcock 

Related links

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0117709/


http://www.danielbruhl.com/