Acting

Forever Club is the very first radio play I got to do, and at the same time the second lead role I ever got to play. One of the most beautiful projects, where I learned an enormous amount, recorded in Berlin. The producer, screenwriter, director and driving force behind it, Jette Volland, had discovered me completely by chance during casting research. Back then I had started my first little podcast, together with another half-Asian who was also named Peter, and that was pretty funny: he was, I think, half Filipino and half German, and I'm half Korean and half German, he was called Peter and I was Heinrich. The podcast was about anti-Asian racism. It only had a few hundred clicks, but I had linked my agency and acting profile underneath it. She saw that I had already shot several things and requested me through the agency for a casting. I was supposed to send an audio sample, my first audio casting, in which I read several excerpts from the script in different variations. She really liked it. The role was written as Asian, meaning a half or full Asian who grew up in Germany, and that mattered: even though it was a radio play, there was the idea of marketing it with fitting characters and roles, because in the long run they might really turn it into a series with film and video. For that I later also recorded a Moodtape.

But back to the radio play first. I had spoken with her on the phone, and at that time I was also still working in Filmpool development. She really pushed me, because I was a bit unsure, partly because of Tatort, where my voice had been replaced. I doubted whether I'd even be suited for a spoken radio-play role, because it was slowly becoming very clear to me that I had a very strong Cologne mumble. But she gave me a lot of confidence, said that would be complete nonsense, that she believed in me and that I could pull it off. So I said yes and travelled to Berlin several times, it was a longer project. We shot in Berlin for about one to one and a half weeks and later recorded a few more things and episodes. There I got to meet this super cool acting team, with Mercedes, Jonas, Anuthida and Polly. It was simply incredible, and I was nervous back then too: Anuthida had been on Germany's Next Topmodel, Mercedes Müller was already a very successful actress, and Jonas Ems was one of the most successful YouTubers and still is to this day. The whole team was amazing. Until then I hadn't really been aware that audio is such an intense craft, and I got to meet really talented editors and sound engineers for the first time. We recorded in a beautiful sound studio in Berlin that also had a concert hall, where I got to play the grand piano the whole time during the breaks. Jonas and the others really took me in, they were from Berlin and showed me the city; Mercedes introduced me to friends, and in the evenings we went out through the clubs. Jette and Simon took great care of us and pulled it all off wonderfully.

It's a truly beautiful project. Through Jonas I got to know the Berlin YouTuber scene a little; he was a YouTuber himself who really made films, also came from Cologne and went to a neighbouring school, we were exactly the same, only he had moved to Berlin. All super inspiring. Anuthida was actually Thai, having grown up in Germany, and because I had this connection to Thailand through Muay Thai, it really clicked. We played siblings, and the chemistry worked really well; she later moved over to Thailand too. So yeah, blessed again, in that time I was simply blessed.

And once again it turned out that I mumble a bit. This time, though, there was a lot of time, and the production gave me a speech coach. Every morning I had my speech sessions with exercises, and for the first time I really paid attention to pronunciation, breathing and everything else. I even got that training paid for, and it immediately showed in the audio again and gave me much more confidence, really practicing conveying emotions and ideas with my voice and seeing a little where the journey is heading. A beautiful project. A few months later, because the project was well received, money was freed up for a Moodtape of Forever Club. Purely in terms of imagery and the set, that was the highest level I had experienced so far, in terms of preparation, scene design, light, colour and everything else: beautifully shot, a whole new level. You could tell that Jette had studied at the HFF, the Munich film school. Everyone was a role model to me, because for me Berlin was such a big, intense city and I felt like a village kid from Cologne, and they had all really been to film school, all super successful. I was flashed and intimidated at the same time and had a lot of insecurities too, but in hindsight it was again one of the peak moments.

At that time, though, I was in a lot of doubt with myself, my relationship was slowly falling apart, and my studies were coming to an end. Shortly after my studies I then threw everything away and first went to Thailand. That's also why I didn't shoot the second season, because at that point I was very confused and had no idea what I really wanted. AI had come out, I had just finished my computer science bachelor's degree, and I had the feeling that I had wasted time and that I'd be replaced by AI, that AI could now even take over something like a radio play, everything reduced to the result instead of the path. There is a second season today, but it's without me and, I believe, without the other actors, though still with Mercedes Müller. And it's so far the last project I did. After that I even left my agency, because I had told myself that for now I no longer really felt like acting, so a break. Then I went to Thailand, fought a lot of Muay Thai and tried out other things. And now this is the last piece I'm reflecting on, the one I'm writing my thoughts about, and in doing so I see: wow, actually the path was paved for me, actually it was like a final practice drive on which I got to iron out many weaknesses regarding my speech, my emotions and my expression. And actually now it's simply time to take the whole thing seriously, to see it through, to stand behind it and not let others make me insecure. I'm very, very glad and grateful that I got to reflect on this once more. And honestly, from a gut feeling, I don't think this chapter is closed, but we'll see. Forever Club, the first radio play in which I got to play a lead role.

Mica is 17 and is sent to boarding school in Bavaria to finally come to terms with life. Four new friends help her deal with her problems. What Mica doesn't know: they are dead. They died in a car accident, and only Mica can help them find out who is responsible.

Based on the audio series "Forever Club" by WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk).

Written, directed & produced by Jette Volland Director of photography: Holger Jungnickel 1st AD & producer: Simon Schneller Production designer: Josef Brandl Editor: Ascanius Böttger Original music by Edwin Rosen

Cast — Mica: Mercedes Müller · Alek: Heinrich Berger · Bibi: Anuthida Ploypetch · Mike: Jonas Ems · Kat: Polly Roche

Crew (selection): 1st camera assistant Michael Schneider · 2nd camera assistant Dung Ngoc Pham · Gaffer Björn-Lennart Hübscher · Art direction Celina Hollaender, Denise Meinholz, Fia Bartesch · Sound Leo Aderhold, Bastian Wilhelmy · Make-up Alla Leonova, Malina Koch · Sound design & re-recording Larissa Kischk · Colour grading Panoptimo GmbH (Markus Baburske) · Camera equipment Vantage Film GmbH.

© 2023 Junique Productions GmbH. For Jack (the best boy forever).

One day my agency at the time sent me a casting for Tatort. It was a bit more involved than the E-casting before it, and it was a demanding role too: I played the victim's gay best friend. Because it isn't clear at first that the character is gay, I'm initially suspected of having killed my best friend out of jealousy. Then, in an interrogation scene, it quickly becomes clear that the character is gay, and over time the two detectives keep showing up, asking me about new things, giving me clues — until I finally take revenge once I know who really murdered my best friend. The scene I had to play in the E-casting was exactly that one, where I say that I sleep with men. It was a good new exercise for me, because I'd never played a character with a different sexuality before; at the same time there were no gay sex scenes, it was really about the content of the story. I put a lot of effort into the E-casting, and in the end I simply got the part.

Then I traveled to Berlin and was on a Tatort set for the first time. I met Mark Waschke and Meret Becker, which was completely wild — I'd already seen a lot of Mark Waschke, and I knew Meret Becker through my parents, and suddenly I was acting alongside both of them. I was very nervous on set. The things I'd done before were Krass Abschlussklasse and Köln 50667 and a few of my own projects, and at that point I was surrounded by a lot of hate and probably envy too. This was exactly the thing everyone had always told me I'd never manage — and I hadn't even actively pursued it. Suddenly I was in Berlin, getting into makeup, getting costumes and my own costume trailer, a hotel, being picked up by drivers. The director trusted me completely and I got a lot of praise. Getting to be in Tatort even once was a great experience and gave me confidence.

Something interesting: I was in Berlin for about a week, and a few months later I got a call asking whether I could re-record everything, because I mumbled too much — that Cologne mumble you can hear. I flew back to Berlin specially and re-dubbed it over several hours in the studio. But at the German premiere my voice wasn't in it after all; they'd used a different voice and dubbed over me completely. In hindsight no one wanted to tell me outright that my voice was too dark and didn't sound homosexual enough — certain people told me that later, and by now I can understand it: when you watch the broadcast, you really can think the other voice fits better. But the team and the production sent me my clip with my real voice — the video here, these excerpts are the original parts, the way I spoke back then. Being broadcast with a different voice really made me insecure at the time.

Overall, though, it was even more intense, because so, so many people recognized me on German TV for the first time. Friends' parents wrote to their kids that they'd seen me, and the kids then wrote to me. At the time I'd started working part-time again in Filmpool development, and I hadn't told many people that I'd filmed it or when it would air. The next day I came into Filmpool, and the managing director and all the producers had seen it — that was lovely, and it made me proud, because Filmpool was where I'd had my first acting career with Köln 50667, and I was basically the first Köln 50667 cast member to make it all the way to Tatort. A huge success. Even so, I was very insecure about everything at that time — maybe because I'd reached that level for the first time and was surrounded by real actors. Tatort was very impressive to me, the camera crews, the actors; I really felt that there's a level in this game. It led to many more projects afterwards, among them Forever Club, which was also an ARD production — again a radio drama, again in Berlin. Since then I've had an IMDb entry, I'm in the acting register, I have a Crew United profile, and with that I'm really officially an actor. Krass Abschlussklasse had already listed me, but after Tatort it was final.

Here, too, I want to stress again how grateful I am that these acting legends welcomed me so warmly, that everything worked out so well, and that I got to meet the whole team — everyone was super nice. I was supported, the director coached me well, the scenes worked, and the mask, hair and costume were more elaborate too; more time was taken and more care given to making sure everything sat properly. I worked with an award-winning cameraman and an award-winning sound team, and I simply got to act in a German series — to this day, nothing but endless gratitude and love. Sometimes you do things and don't even realize that you're right in the middle of exactly the process you always wanted to be in — because you're so nervous, or so busy working. I won't say I'd dreamed of it, and yet somewhere I had dreamed of it. I struggled with this for a long time: I love acting, being on set, building something with other people and playing through the story together — but I also always had a kind of paranoia about it being broadcast and people seeing me. When I watched myself, I'd always wonder whether I was too fat, or whether people would now think I'm actually gay, because I'm rather introverted and don't share much of myself. That was a sickness a lot of Köln 50667 and reality-soap actors had: that you didn't really see yourself as an actor at all, full of self-doubt and impostor syndrome. Today, with a few years' distance, I look back and think: that was a top performance, it gets broadcast, you gave your best — and the thing with the voice doesn't matter, that had other reasons. That, too, is something that moved me forward in the end.

Krass Abschlussklasse was the biggest project I've done as an actor so far, and also the only real project where I played a lead role in front of the camera across many episodes. As so often, it was a huge stroke of luck: when the request came in, I was in Bali, had spent the previous month training combat sports in Thailand, was surfing a lot and generally on the move. I got an e-casting, recorded it together with a friend who was also in Bali, and immediately got the reply that I'd been cast for the pilot — because we shot a pilot first. I had just dropped out of Pixel Vision and thought: what do I have to lose?

We shot the pilot back in Cologne, and that was cool again, because it turned out that one of the producers was a former cameraman at Köln 50667 and knew a lot of people around the set. The cameraman had gone freelance with a friend and founded One Shot UG back then; the whole thing ran together with Tresor TV. The pilot went over really well, and after that the production of the entire series got going quickly. New actors were cast who hadn't appeared in the pilot at all. I really had a lead role, there was a proper script, and we shot over several months.

For me it was the first time we recorded more scene by scene — with a real script, in quotation marks, because at Köln it was always more of a guideline for where a scene should go. Here we shot everything in one piece, not like at Köln with several teams at once, every day. It was a self-contained story, and so it was also the first time I really worked at one set for a longer stretch, learned lines every day and played a lot in costume. I got even more of a look behind the scenes, learned more about RTL, how things work with broadcasters, how you sell a series, how it gets tested, how financing comes together. I got to hang out a lot in the studio and with the cameramen. Overall it was much more demanding: at Köln I also played a lot, but a lot of it was closer to myself — as an actor you always bring something of yourself, there's no other way. At Köln, though, it was, in quotation marks, easier, because the roles were already written to fit your own character traits. On Krass Abschlussklasse it was pretty random for me personally — the story was written completely without me in the picture. Really stepping into that, staying in the role and making clear to myself in every scene what emotional context or relationship phase we were in, was one of the most intense and demanding experiences I've had.

In the end it was the project that gave me a bit more attention in various broadcaster circles, and in hindsight it was proof that I'm not just a "performer." That was always a thing with Köln 50667: when I started back then, everyone told me I'd burn my face and wouldn't be able to do anything afterwards. I myself never really had the big goal of becoming the greatest actor — I acted because film interested me and I wanted to know how acting works. And it's actually not true that you ruin your face like that; on the contrary, where else do you get so much live acting and set experience? The series unfortunately didn't get a second season because the ratings weren't that good. At the time there was a show called Krass Schule running in parallel on RTL II, and our series was actually just called Abschlussklasse — then RTL decided to put "Krass" in front of it to align the branding with Krass Schule. In hindsight that probably wasn't so clever from a marketing standpoint, but who am I to judge. Fundamentally it really was a great project. Back then it was just becoming possible to record at very high quality with affordable full-frame cameras, basically straight away with two cameras, and quality-wise Krass Abschlussklasse simply looked much fresher than all the other German formats at the time — which probably confused a lot of people too. To this day I don't know what it really came down to.

It probably brought me to Tatort in hindsight — as an actor you never really know that for sure. When the series aired, I had just started studying computer science and was actually very introverted. Acting was always also a way for me to come out of my shell, to dare to do something and to be around people, because I was really always this little gaming and computer nerd. That's why Krass Abschlussklasse was an extreme challenge: at first I didn't really register that I was suddenly this bad boy the girls were into, and still having to pull that off convincingly. I watched a lot of the young Johnny Depp, because the producers said it reminded them of Cry Baby, and I looked at old castings and auditions of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in which they played similar roles. I bought myself an acting book specially and practiced — at that time I was pretty much alone, a bit isolated and had withdrawn, and I'd actually already decided to study computer science. When I look back at it today with a few years' distance, I realize what a wild project it actually was — something I didn't really take in back then, like with almost all the projects I was part of. Today I can clearly say it was one of the coolest and longest projects, it reminds me a lot of that time, and I'm very happy that it exists. Thanks again to everyone involved for the chance and the trust, for letting me play this, for supporting and praising me, and for everyone always believing in me and treating me kindly. I notice more and more how blessed I am.