Til Schweiger

Tilman Valentin Schweiger was born in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany, on December 19, 1963. Til, as his friends and family called him, trained as an actor at the Der Keller Theater Acting School in Cologne between 1986 and 1989. With Two brothers, he had previously tried to study medicine, but gave up to opt for his acting side. When it came to acting, he started out on the theater stages in Cologne and Bonn.

Good-looking handsome, he made his film debut in a big way, or at least was given a leading role in the comedy Manta, Manta (1991), whose title alludes to a German car, the Opel Manta. An inconsequential title, it allowed him to do two years later as a boxer in Ebbies Bluff, a film that won him a youth award at the Max Ophüls Festival . But it would undoubtedly be The Desired Man ( Sönke Wortmann , 1994), the entanglement film that would make him popular, where he gave life to a guy who, kicked out of the house by his girlfriend for being unfaithful, goes to live with a homosexual who is feel attracted to him.

In 1995 he found love and married the American model Dana Carlson. He has had four children with her. Although they ended up separating in 2005, they have never been divorced.

Schweiger made his television debut in series such as Die Kommisarin , but it was clear that what interested him was cinema, and in 1996 he created the production company Mr. Brown Entertainment with two partners, Thomas Zickler and André Hennicke . The company’s first film had his interest and was very popular. I am referring to Knockin’on Heaven’s Door (Thomas Jann, 1997), where Schweiger co-wrote the script and played one of the two terminally ill protagonists, who wanted to live their last days intensely; of course, the title alluded to the fantastic Bob Dylan song . Later, in 2005, his production company would be Barefoot Films.

1998 was the year in which he tried his luck in Hollywood, filming in English. So he made Replacement Assassins , pure and simple action directed by Antoine Fuqua, and Judas’s Kiss , a thriller by Sebastián Gutiérrez where he was accompanied by Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman . As if that were not enough, he also chose 1998 to make his directorial debut, helped by Granz Henman, in the fast-paced and gangster action film Der Eisbär , in which he also starred. What role he played behind the camera and whether he was satisfied is not clear, but the reality is that he did not direct again until 2005, with Barfuss ., a film in which he also acted, was a womanizer –his typical character, you could say– who finally falls in love with a woman, a mentally unbalanced one; The film won him a Bambi award, and it was well received, so he took up his facet as an actor-director with A Rabbit Without Ears (2007) and Kokowääh (2011), where he returned to his role as a womanizer who ends up settling down; Curiously, in both there are children in the plot, the first one is set in the world of the yellow press, the other shows us Schweiger’s character discovering that his prosmicity has given him a daughter whose existence he was unaware of.

Schweiger’s case is curious, as he promotes his own projects, shot in German, and gets small roles in Hollywood films. Among these we can point out Driven ( Renny Harlin , 2001), Formula 1 with Sylvester Stallone , Tomb Raider. The cradle of life ( Jan De Bont , 2003), a villain faced with the video game heroine played by Angelina Jolie , King Arthur (2004), where he repeated with Antoine Fuqua , U-Boat ( Tony Giglio , 2004), one of submarines in WWII, and even the spawn with Rob Schneider Deuce Bigelow: European Gigolo ( Mike Bigelow , 2005). Although his role is minor, his best work for the movie mecca has been with Quentin Tarantino , under whose orders he was in Inglourious Basterds (2009).

Admittedly, Schweiger is good at tough guy roles, but he’s not a man of great acting resources. What is certain is that he has worked hard to carve out his career, so that he can combine roles in other people’s films with the development of films produced by his company, perhaps not masterpieces, but very commercial ones. in Germany. Of the first, This Means War will soon arrive , along with Reese Witherspoon , The Courier , where Mickey Rourke accompanies him , and a new version of The Three Musketeers (2011) .