Daniel Brühl's greatest assets are his eyebrows. When he refrains from plucking them, they form a nearly continuous bushy line that lends a sense of mystery to his face. Every glance the actor delivers from beneath these brows seems be twice as meaningful. By the time you ask, »What on earth does this boy have to hide?« you've already fallen under Daniel's spell.
The magic of his eyebrows came later to Daniel's career, though: His fame began with his voice. At the age of 8, he came in first in a reading competition - prompting his uncle, a radio-play director, to organize a speaking part for him. From radio plays, Daniel moved on to provide German voice overs for American actors, including lending his voice to a young Jackie Chan.
With each new film, Daniel gathered experience for his later career: »Speaking is without question a preliminary form of acting,«,he says. At 15, he made the jump from the anonymity of the voice-over box to the big screen. Since his eyebrows came into action, Daniel has been raking in awards, although the self-taught actor has never seen the inside of a drama school. »Traveling and getting to know people is a far better school«, he says. Meanwhile, he is one of the busiest young stars in Germany, shooting three or four films a year, taking parts he likes: an erring monk, a lovesick boy doing community service, a boxer.
His most impressive achievement, in the movie »Das weiße Rauschen« (»White Noise«), pushed Daniel to the border of insanity: Feeling embarassed about portraying a boy suffering from schizophrenia without fully understanding it, he decided to measure his own degree of lunacy. »In films, these people are normally portrayed as mass murderers or crazy geniuses. We wanted to show the reality,« he says. So he unsettled his environment: babbling to himself in the supermarket and fixing his gaze for minutes at a time on people in the tram, realizing how quickly one can be taken for a psychopath. »It's so easy to break the ranks!« Daniel says.
During shooting, he broke off all contact with friends and family and stayed on the set overnight to experience the isolation of a schizophrenic. After more than 100 hours of shooting, Daniel was so exhausted, he was ready to drown his director. His commitment, though, was rewarded with enthusiastic reviews. Such successes make Daniel happy, even if many of his films do not attract the masses. He prefers to win over his audience with quality, a tactic that might prove more successful in the long run than letting his talent be wasted in silly blockbusters. Of course, the eyebrows help, too: Once you've glanced into Daniel's face, you cannot look away so quickly again.
1978 Daniel Brühl is born in Barcelona,Spain, on June 16 to a Spanish mother and a German father
1994 First television appearance in »Svens Geheimnis« by Roland Suso Richter
1999 Big screen debut in the drama »Schlaraffenland« with Franka Potente (»Run Lola Run«)
2001 Engagement to the music television presenter Jessica Schwarz, who he met on the set of »Nichts bereuen.« He is also awarded the Bayerischer Filmpreis
2002 Daniel is cast as the lead in »Soloalbum,« a movie based on the bestselling novel by Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre
Andrea Benda, 28, envies Daniel Brühl for having had the opportunity to voice-over the fight screams of one of the greatest Asian action stars since Bruce Lee
