Daniel Brühl

Curiously enough, the most representative young face of current German cinema was born in Spain, where his father, the television director Hanno Brühl, had met his wife, a Catalan woman, during a filming in our country. The marriage had its first offspring in Germany, but the hospital experience was so unfortunate that she stopped trusting German doctors. When she became pregnant again, she decided to give birth in Barcelona, ​​where Daniel César Martín Brühl González Domingo, her aristocratic real name, was born on June 18, 1978. His family settled permanently in Cologne, although the Brühls used to visit the Catalan grandparents every year. “Actually, I have more family in Spain than in Germany, and my brother has lived in Barcelona for years,” she revealed. Daniel Brühl himself also says that his acting vocation comes to him as a child, because at the tender age of 4 years the “little angel” played dead to scare his mother. He decided to dedicate himself to acting after a few children’s performances, which cost his father a displeasure, who, being a director, knew the shady part of the profession. “He wanted to protect me because he knows very well that many actors end badly. Interestingly, now that he’s seen me work, he thinks I’m not bad at it, and we even made a movie together, “He wanted to protect me because he knows very well that many actors end badly. Interestingly, now that he’s seen me work, he thinks I’m not bad at it, and we even made a movie together, “He wanted to protect me because he knows very well that many actors end badly. Interestingly, now that he’s seen me work, he thinks I’m not bad at it, and we even made a movie together,Hin und weg , shot for television, unprecedented in Spain”, explains the actor. Unlike other colleagues, he did not enroll in any drama school, but he is self-taught. At fourteen he was given a role in a television series, and at fifteen he shot his first TV movie, Svens Geheimnis , about teenage thieves.

At the beginning of the new millennium, Daniel Brühl combined his work as an actor with music, as he became the singer of Purge, a rock band that did not make too much noise. As fate would have it, he drew more attention as the protagonist of Boxing , a notable boxing drama in which he played a humble boy, determined to make his way in professional boxing. He chained the shooting with Vaya con Dios , a comedy in which he was a young singing monk, who reconsidered his religious vocation after meeting a woman for the first time.

In any case, what all fans of quality cinema will remember is that Daniel Brühl said goodbye to the status of unknown actor, with Goodbye, Lenin! . In this dazzling tragicomedy by Wolfgang BeckerHe was a young man capable of doing anything to avoid displeasure for his mother, a convinced communist who has just come out of a coma. Since she would have a heart attack if she found out that the Berlin Wall has fallen, as has the regime she revered, the boy weaves a web of lies to maintain the fiction that nothing has changed. In addition to conquering the hearts of the public in all the countries where it was released, the film became a mass phenomenon among Germans, who saw the drastic transformations of their country reflected on the screen in a short period of time. At the European film awards, Brühl won the prize for best actor.

From a former communist he became an anarchist in Los edukadores , where he was a member of a gang that sneaked into the homes of wealthy people, to turn their furniture upside down and leave them a message that would stir their bourgeois consciences. Until he decides to kidnap the owner of one of the robbed houses, a reconverted ‘sixty-year-old’. “Of course, I think my character is doing the wrong thing, but he identified with his political consciousness. I accepted the role because I identified with the character, to the extent that he intends to find solutions, to solve problems, ”recalls Brühl.

Determined to combine his career in Turkish cinema with other European films, he embarked on a British project, Last Spring , where he was an amnesiac castaway taken in by two charming old women. Brühl panicked when he found out that he had co-stars with two ladies of English theater and cinema, Judi Dench and Maggie Smith ., so much so that he had to drink a whiskey before starting to shoot. However, he was delighted with both actresses. “Despite such an impressive career that the two have, they strive not to fall into the routine, nor the boredom that veteran actors sometimes reflect. They were like two girls excited about a new toy”, recalls Brühl. In any case, his next job was more interesting, Merry Christmas, emotional drama in which he played a secondary character, a lieutenant who underwent a huge transformation. “In the Great War, young Germans marched euphorically to the front, because they were tired of the system, of the government, and they thought that by going to conquer Europe they would change society,” he explains. “My character is a somewhat befuddled patriot, who suddenly realizes that the enemy is made up of human beings.” Although the film recreates an unusual event, the truce reached by the soldiers at the front on Christmas Eve, the truth is that it was based on real events. “When the script came to me, I thought it was a story by a rather fanciful screenwriter. But I told my father about it, and he told me that this had really happened, ”recalls Brühl.

Especially difficult was the filming of Cargo , a thriller with a message that forced him to spend months on the boat where the action takes place. “I came to hate the boat because I was also looking forward to taking photos, one of my great hobbies, through the streets of Barcelona”, laments Brühl. He was finally able to stay in Barcelona for a long time during the filming of Salvador Puig Antich , where he played another anarchist, a real character who was sentenced to death at the end of the Franco regime.

It is seen that Brühl is willing to roll piecemeal, now that it is fashionable, yes, choosing his projects with a magnifying glass. “I am not interested in cinema that does not have a message. A film that won’t bring me anything as a spectator, I don’t want to shoot it as an actor”, confesses Brühl, who has made the war drama In Tranzit , with John Malkovich and the comedy Two Days , starring, written and directed by the actress Julie Delpy . Brühl himself dreams of bringing to the screen a script that he is preparing and that takes place in South America.