Retrospective: Daniel Brühl

40 years looking back on his early work

It is the first time, that the Goethe-Institut Sri Lanka is dedicating a whole film serie to an actor. Daniel Brühl, can look back on fourty years of life and a remarkable filmography on June 16. As a son of a Katalonian and a German Daniel Cesar Martin Brühl Gonzales was born in Barcelona and then grew up in Cologne. Because of his two French aunts, the German actor learned three languages ​​at a young age - German, Spanish and French - and enjoyed quite early a multicultural environment that has proven itself for its international assignments.
During school he began to actively deal with acting and participated in the theater. His father, the German director Hanno Brühl, promoted his son's interest in the film industry and got him after some recorded radio plays, the first TV role at the age of 15 years in the German series Verbotene Liebe.
He gained great publicity with his role as Alex Kerner in Goodbye, Lenin!  The movie took place in former Berlin (East) in autumn 1989: Alex Kerner's mother is in a coma after a heart attack and misses the fall of the Berlin Wall. She awakes in summer 1990. Her doctor declares that excitement of any kind could be fatal. Alex must conceal the fall of the SED regime from her. He and his friends pretend to the sick woman that the GDR still exists; the illusion remains perfect until one day the truth can no longer be concealed.
This success was both a curse and a blessing. On the one hand he was able to attract attention internationally through his acting performance, on the other hand, the movie character gave him the identity of the nice guy and made it difficult for him to get new jobs outside of this scheme. The fact that international directors saw more in him ultimately helped him to escape from this vicious circle and he was able to assert himself in more multifaceted roles.
Daniel Brühl's style stands out mainly through his film characters. He has been able to use the medium to convey telling stories that will inspire the audience to think and make a difference. The value of pure entertainment should not be in the focus.
And how does he retrospectively look at his forty years? "I can be a very negative, almost destructive person who is too self-critical. Meanwhile, however, I have found that I have too often spent too much time with the wrong thoughts. Today I realize that the most things didn´t  matter in the end. And of course that has a lot to do with the little rascal I have now at home. That's a very good feeling. So the 40 can come. "
He is currently seen as a psychologist in the new Netflix series "The Alienist - encirclement" alongside Luke Evans and Dakota Fanning, while at the same time being able to shine as a terrorist in "Seven Days in Entebbe" alongside Rosamunde Pike.