Tom Wlaschiha
Tom Wlaschiha is an actor, born 1973.
Wlaschiha worked in German film and television for more than a decade before Game of Thrones exported him. Jaqen H'ghar is in a cage in his first scene, and Wlaschiha plays him with a strange formal cadence, all third person and unhurried courtesy, which turned a small recurring part into one of the show's most quoted characters. He appeared in three of its seasons.
The interesting thing about the career is that he moves between two industries without either flattening him. At home he has done substantial work: Hagen Forster in the Das Boot series, the black-magic apprenticeship of Krabat, a Christopher Isherwood adaptation. Abroad the brief is narrower, and he is usually cast as the competent European. Crossing Lines ran him as a Berlin detective in a pan-European unit. Stranger Things put him in a Soviet prison as Dmitri Antonov, and the Russian accent stacked on top of the German one is a party trick he pulls off cleanly.
He works in at least three languages, mostly in supporting roles, and the pattern is that productions hire him when a scene needs a foreigner who is nobody's fool. Recent work has been quieter and often better: a priest in Mrs. Davis, a German in a Shanghai-set spy film, a lead in Yunan.
Movies (11)
TV (7)
Where to start with Tom Wlaschiha
Game of Thrones is why anyone is here, and Jaqen is worth the search even if the rest of the show does not interest you: seasons two, five and six, mostly short scenes, all memorable for the same reason, which is that he never raises his voice.
Stranger Things is the other big one and the more purely enjoyable performance. Dmitri is written as half of a comic double act and Wlaschiha plays the straight half with real charm.
For the German work, Das Boot is the substantial one, a submarine series with a shore-side plot that gives him a genuinely nasty job to do. Krabat is the strange one, a folk-horror apprenticeship story of a kind English-language fantasy rarely attempts. Crossing Lines is the procedural if you want to watch him carry episodes.
Two smaller pleasures: Mr. Turner hands him Prince Albert for one exquisitely awkward scene, and Rush uses him as a rival driver in a film much better than a racing drama needs to be.