Thomas Kretschmann

Thomas Kretschmann was born in Dessau in 1962, in what was then East Germany, and his breakthrough was Stalingrad in 1993, playing Lieutenant Hans von Witzland in a German war film about the destruction of an army from the inside. It typed him permanently, and he has spent thirty years being the actor international productions call when they need a German officer.

The interesting thing is what he does inside that box. Kretschmann plays uniforms from the inside rather than commenting on them from outside. Captain Hosenfeld in The Pianist is the test case: the officer who helps, played with no warmth, no signalling, no invitation to feel relieved about him, which is exactly why the scene works. In Downfall he is Hermann Fegelein and in Valkyrie he is Otto Remer, both real men, both played as functionaries rather than monsters. He also took the reporter's role in A Taxi Driver, a Korean film about the Gwangju uprising, which gave him a rare chance to be the outsider looking in.

Outside that, he works constantly and not always well, which he seems relaxed about. He was Captain Englehorn in Peter Jackson's King Kong, Baron von Strucker in the Marvel films, and the voice of Professor Z in Cars 2. He has also spent a lot of years in genre pictures, Blade II, Resident Evil: Apocalypse, Hostel: Part III, a couple of Dracula projects, where he is invariably the most convincing element of a film that does not deserve him. Being very good and being well used are separate problems, and his filmography is a long record of the difference.