Every actor dreams of getting a role that could change their life. The tricky part is what you do when it finally happens. Acclaimed German actor Oliver Masucci got one in 2017, when Netflix’s Dark became a global phenomenon.
“How have you been treated differently since Dark?” we ask.
“That’s not the question,” Oliver Masucci corrects. “It’s not ‘how were you treated?’ The question is always, ‘how did you treat yourself?”
If Masucci’s mood is to be judged, the actor has treated himself well since the mind-bending time travel series won devoted fans in places that likely had never before seen a German show. Talking on Zoom, Masucci is ebullient, bouncing across the screen, quick to joke and quicker to laugh. It’s a far cry from the dour, brooding Ulrich that won him the world’s attention.
“For the world, of course, I became famous with Dark. And that was pretty nice, because I have friends everywhere now. When I go to Rome, I get treated very well in the restaurants, and I get treated very well on the streets in New York. No one’s screaming and shouting, and I hope it will never be that way, because for the moment, this is quite nice,” says Masucci.
The actor called us unexpectedly during his lunch break on the London set of the latest Fantastic Beasts film, finding some spare time he didn’t think he’d have. He apologizes as he inhales asparagus and San Pellegrino, careful not to get any on the velvet black suit and crisp, unbuttoned white shirt he’s wearing for his next scene.
“I hope you don’t mind that I eat a little bit, because afterwards, I have to act again,” he says.
He’s certainly been busy. In addition to the upcoming Beasts 3, Masucci has a starring role in a new Netflix show from the producers of Dark called Tribes of Europa, streaming now on the platform, which imagines a future in which society has fallen and Europe has been divided into competing groups or ‘tribes’ that are each approaching the post-apocalypse with vastly different philosophies.
Masucci’s got the best character on the show. As he puts it himself, he’s the Han Solo.
‘He’s not aligned with any tribe. He’s for himself. He’s the cowboy. He doesn’t have a Millennium Falcon, but he has his fire-fighting car with the solar panels. And he knows everybody, and could go everywhere. He’s been everywhere. And he’s the guy who always finds a way out. If something’s happened, he always knows a little hole where you can slip through. There’s so much ability to make up new stories for him.”
After Dark, Masucci reveled in his newfound ability to play up the absurdity of his Tribes character of Moses. He went to the director constantly with new affectations that he could try out—“he’s always sniffing everything. Even if there’s danger, he’s just sniffling everywhere”—going with what inspired him in the moment.
‘Playing Ulrich in Dark was, at the end, no fun at all. You always have to cry, there was always something very bad happening to you. You were always trying to find your child. Each scene was getting worse and worse and worse. This was horrifying for me,” says Masucci.
He brought his kids to where they were filming Tribes in Croatia, and his love of entertaining his children spilled over into the character, sprinkling constant jokes into every scene he appears. At points on the set, Masucci had to fight with the director to include the bits he was coming up with.
“In one scene, I opened a can with a can opener that said best before 2019, [and he opens it] in 2074. He said that the best before date is an invention of the food industry. I improvised this line and the director wouldn’t take it. I said you have to take it. Because this is the best line. This is the punch line!”
Usually, they listened to him. The man knows what he’s doing. And thirty years into his career, he can basically run on instinct.
That doesn’t mean he doesn’t work to hone his craft, of course. Just the opposite—he lives and breathes acting, if only for the sole reason that he can’t seem to stop wondering what’s going on in the head of every stranger he passes by.
“Sometimes I see a guy on the streets, and I follow him because, of course, it’s my joy. When I get nothing to do, I’m just sitting in a restaurant. I watch people. I love watching people, and how they behave, how they act, and trying to get into them. Then I just try to figure out who’s that guy? What might he do? What might they have for a job? What is he thinking now? How is he behaving? Why is he looking so strange? Why is he so sad? And I start to ask myself these questions and then I fall in love. I fell in love with some guy or some girl, some people I just see on the streets, and then I want to play them. And then I make up a character,” says Masucci.
Masucci ends up storing all of those people in the back of his mind, waiting for a character he’s offered to awaken the memory of one of those characters he keeps for the right moment. Sometimes it happens by accident, sometimes on purpose, molding the people he’s kept in his head with the people he meets on the page.
“That’s the fun thing about being an actor, you know? Everything is acting. Everything which occurs in reality, you take it, and you change it to something which you bring into the art. So everything has something to do with the thing I’m doing at the moment.”
Maybe we were both wrong. It’s not how you’re treated, it’s not how you treat yourself, it’s how you treat the world around you. For Masucci, Moses is probably the closest to his actual personality of any character he’s played. Moses is a guy who reshapes every scene he’s in to suit his fancy, transforming the tone and energy in the process. He’s a guy who does what he wants regardless of the rules that anyone else has set. That’s Masucci, too.
“That’s how I tried to shape my reality. I strongly believe in that everybody can shape his own reality the way he wants it to be. I wanted to become an actor because I wanted to be the guy on the screen. I wanted to live in those worlds. I didn’t want the reality which exists. I want to make up my own reality. And if people tell you, , that’s not for real and you will not succeed, that it’s not reachable—I never listened to people. Just listen to your fantasy. That’s the thing which brings you there. It’s what you want the world to be. that’s all I can tell you.”
At that moment, we’re interrupted by a person walking into the back of his trailer, alerting him that his time is up.
“Alright, I’m about to travel to see Mads Mikkelsen and Jude Law. Very nice. I’m having fun in the moment right now.”
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