Actor, director, producer, and multiple European Film Award-winner Daniel Brühl will be a guest of this year’s 58th Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, where he will also receive the KVIFF President’s Award. On this occasion, Daniel Brühl will present his directorial debut Next Door.
Brühl has regularly appeared in film and on television since the mid-1990s, quickly winning German national film awards – for example, for Das weiße Rauschen (2001, The White Sound), which received rave reviews from German critics. An important milestone in his career came with Wolfgang Becker’s nostalgic tragicomedy Good Bye, Lenin! (2003), which dominated the European Film Awards and earned Brühl two European Film Awards – one from the jury and a People’s Choice Award based on a public vote. He was also Germany’s winner of the EFP Shooting Stars Award for Top Young Actor, which is presented at the Berlinale.
His second nomination for the European Film Awards was for his performance in the crime drama The Educators (2004), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
This was soon followed by a role in Charles Dance’s British film Ladies in Lavender (2004), where he appeared alongside Judy Dench and Maggie Smith.
The romantic drama Love in Thoughts (2004) brought him another EFA People’s Choice Award for Best Actor.
The Barcelona-born Brühl returned to his native Spain in 2006 for Salvador (Puig Antich), a biopic inspired by the story of the Catalan anarchist of the same name. Besides working on numerous European productions, Brühl also regularly receives offers from Hollywood. He starred in one instalment of the Bourne series, The Bourne Ultimatum (2007); won a Screen Actors Guild Award along with the rest of the cast of Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009); and appeared alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in the drama The Fifth Estate (2013).
His portrayal of Formula One race car driver Niki Lauda in Ron Howard’s Rush (2013) earned him a number of international awards, including a Golden Globe nomination and a BAFTA award. He also played the main villain in the Marvel Comics film Captain America: Civil War (2016), filmed several scenes from the war drama The Zookeeper’s Wife (2017) in Prague, played a German radical hijacker in the political thriller based on true events Entebbe (2018), and appeared in a smaller role in Matthew Vaughn’s action film The King’s Man (2021).
In 2019, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor in a miniseries or television film for his role in the period television series The Alienist (2018–2020).
In 2021, he directed and starred in Next Door, a comedy about envy and revenge. He was involved as both actor and executive producer in the 2022 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s famous novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which went on to win four Academy Awards. His most recent credits include the Disney+ biographical series Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, in which he plays the title role of the fashion icon.
