Matthias Brandt does less on screen than almost any actor working, and the less he does the more we watch. Publishers, policemen, a bartender telling another man's story: men who have read the file before you have opened it.
Fi1m perspective
In Afire (2023), Christian Petzold's summer-house comedy, Matthias Brandt arrives late as Helmut, the publisher, and sits down to read the manuscript his author has been protecting all film. Thomas Schubert's Leon watches his face for a verdict. Brandt gives him a page turned, a pause, a kindness around the eyes that is worse than any judgement. We found the scene hard to look at, because Brandt lets us see that Helmut has read a great many manuscripts, knows within a page what he is holding, and is too tired and too decent to say so. Bettina Böhler holds on Leon a beat longer than is comfortable. It is the best scene in the film, and Brandt barely moves.
That is the trade, and it was learned on stage. Brandt began in the theatre in 1985, in Mannheim, Zurich and Bochum, and the screen took him slowly, from the late 1980s, then properly in television from the mid-2000s. Seven years as commissioner Hanns von Meuffels in Polizeiruf 110 (2011–2018) made him a face German viewers knew. August Benda in Babylon Berlin (2017) put him in front of the rest of us. Then came Petzold, who has now used him four times, beginning with Transit (2018), where Brandt is a bartender who narrates the film from behind his counter. A man telling someone else's story, at one remove, and asking for none of the attention: it is hard to think of a part that suits him better.
He is usually the one with some authority over the others: the publisher, the policeman, the father, the official. What he does with that is let the contradiction show without announcing it, so that the decency and the tiredness and whatever he is not saying all sit on the same still face. The risk is the one his reputation itself points to. He is nearly always asked to be serious, and an actor cast for gravity for long enough can find that stillness has become a habit rather than a choice. In Afire it is still a choice. Helmut is the one person in the house who is not performing, and Leon's panic reads as panic because Brandt refuses to meet it halfway.
Brandt also publishes fiction, which may be why he reads other people's on screen as if the pages had weight. We would like to see him carry a film rather than a supporting part, and under a director other than Petzold who is willing to leave the quiet alone. Until then, Afire, and watch his face while Leon watches it.
Biography
Matthias Brandt is a German actor, narrator and writer. Born in West Berlin in 1961, he is the son of former Chancellor Willy Brandt and Rut Brandt. He studied acting at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover and began his career in theatre, with engagements at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, Schauspielhaus Zürich and Schauspielhaus Bochum; he later joined the Berliner Ensemble.
Brandt has appeared in more than seventy films and television productions since 1989. He is known for his roles as August Benda in the series Babylon Berlin (2017), Hanns von Meuffels in Polizeiruf 110 (2011–2018), the bartender and narrator in Transit (2018), and Helmut in Christian Petzold’s Afire (2023). He has also collaborated again with Petzold on Miroirs No. 3 (2025). Brandt received the Carl Zuckmayer Medal in 2024.
