A stage actor who spent a decade in German theatres before a Bond film made him a screen face, Schick is the henchman, the officer, the hard father. We have seen him once, doing the cruellest thing in a thin film, and it held.
Fi1m perspective
In Dogman (2023) Clemens Schick plays Mike Munrow, a father who breeds fighting dogs in the yard and, when his small son takes the dogs' side, locks the boy in the pen with them while the older brother looks on. We were horrified, and what did it was how ordinary Besson made it look: chain-link on scrubby grass, a house with its lights on a few yards away, a child asleep with his face between a dog's paws. That childhood is the best stretch of a film we scored 54 and found thinner than it looks, and Schick is the man at the centre of it. It is a small part. It is also the only one of his we have reviewed, so we should be plain about how much we can say.
What we can say is where he came from. Schick trained at the Berliner Schule für Schauspiel in the mid-1990s and then did only theatre for ten years, including five in the ensemble at Schauspiel Hannover and appearances at the Salzburg Festival, before Casino Royale (2006) cast him as Kratt, bodyguard to the villain, and turned him into a film actor more or less overnight. He has said himself that the Bond film turned his working life upside down. Since then the work has split three ways: German-language films, international action thrillers, and lately prestige television, Andor (2022) and Babylon Berlin (2026) among them.
The face does the casting. Schick is physically imposing, and English-language producers have read that as henchman, soldier and official ever since Kratt, which is a living but not a career; Renegades (2017) is the usual example. The leads have come at home: Konrad in Futuro Beach (2014), a German-Brazilian drama, and Otto Mühl in Servus Papa - See You in Hell (2022), a demanding part that asked a great deal of him. There is also Luis Brenner in the Austrian western The Dark Valley (2014). We have not reviewed any of them and will not pretend to a view. He has said he has never been one to make that distinction between pop and art, and the list bears him out, but the art half is the half most British viewers have not seen.
So our view, for now, is provisional. The one scene of his we have written about is the best thing in its film, and it is a scene about a father, not a bodyguard, which suggests the tough-guy casting has been missing something. When one of the German leads reaches us we will come back to this page. Until then, watch the childhood section of Dogman and decide for yourself whether to stay for the rest.
Biography
Clemens Schick is a German actor. Born on 15 February 1972 in Tübingen, he studied at the Akademie für Darstellende Kunst in Ulm before training at the Berliner Schule für Schauspiel from 1993 to 1996. He began his career on stage, performing at theatres across Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and was an ensemble member at Schauspiel Hannover from 2001 to 2006.
Schick has appeared in more than seventy film and television productions since 1998. His screen credits include supporting roles in Enemy at the Gates (2001) and Casino Royale (2006), as well as Futuro Beach (2014), DogMan (2023) and the British series Andor (2022). He played the Respectable Man in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes (2023). He is also active as a model and human rights advocate.
