Mikael Persbrandt’s New Movie Premieres In Berlin

On Monday, Mikael Persbrandt’s new movie, Alone in Berlin, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in which he plays the sadistic SS Officer Prall opposite Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson.

Alone In Berlin is based on the 1947 novel Every Man Dies Alone by Hans Fallada, which tells the true story of a couple who placed postcards with anti-Nazi propaganda throughout the German capital in the early 1940s.

Persbrandt said at a press conference that he had some initial reservations about his role: “I’m at the stage of life where I don’t really want to play stencils of malice and wickedness.”

“I told the director Vincent Perez: ‘Should we try to make a man out of this, too?’. But I soon realized that I was a small cog in a big machine and should symbolize evil.”

“Of course it would be more interesting to make the film about Prall when he arrived home from work, taken off his black leather gloves and standing in his underwear in front of the mirror.”

However, Persbrandt is happy with his overall shift in career focus: “This is what I want to do now. It’s nice to be away from Beck, or rather from the kind of productions that go so fast that I feel I cannot deliver.”