Max Riemelt

Biography

Max Riemelt (born 7 January 1984 in East Berlin) is a German actor whose career has been built mostly on German film and television. Internationally, he is best known for playing the safecracker Wolfgang Bogdanow in the Netflix series Sense8.

Riemelt was born in Mitte, East Berlin, and grew up in the city. He began working toward his Abitur but left school in 2007. Largely self-taught, he first performed with his school's theatre group as a child. His screen debut came in 1997 in a supporting role on television, and a leading part in the ZDF Christmas miniseries Zwei allein the following year brought him a wider audience.

His breakthrough owed much to the director Dennis Gansel, with whom he made the teen comedy Mädchen, Mädchen and the Second World War drama Napola. For Napola he won a best actor prize at the Karlovy Vary festival and the Berlinale's Shooting Star award. In 2008 he starred in The Wave, which became the second most successful film in Germany that year. He has also worked repeatedly with Dominik Graf, on the romance The Red Cockatoo and the crime miniseries In the Face of Crime.

In Free Fall (2013), directed by Stephan Lacant, he played a police officer caught in a forbidden romance with a colleague. Often compared to Brokeback Mountain, the film was a hit, and a crowdfunding campaign for a sequel followed in 2017. From 2015 to 2018 he played in Sense8, which was cancelled after its second season and ended with a special of nearly two hours. In 2017 he co-starred with Teresa Palmer in Berlin Syndrome, and in 2021 he joined the cast of The Matrix Resurrections.

Away from features, he has remained a familiar face on German television, and in 2023 he led the political drama Bonn, set in West Germany in 1954. He is the father of a daughter and lives in Berlin.

Key films

• The Wave (2008): a teacher's classroom experiment spirals out of control in this hit that made him a leading name in German cinema.
• Napola (2004): a young man enters an elite Nazi school, one of his key early films with Dennis Gansel.
• Free Fall (2013): a police officer drawn into a secret romance with a colleague, his most internationally noted role.
• Berlin Syndrome (2017): an Australian photographer trapped in a Berlin apartment with a mysterious man, opposite Teresa Palmer.
• The Matrix Resurrections (2021): his role in the fourth instalment of the Wachowskis' franchise.