Christoph Waltz: crime time included “crappy work”

Character mime Christoph Waltz (66) has long been an integral part of the dream factory. It’s almost 15 years since Quentin Tarantino (60) discovered the Austrian for himself and made him a two-time Oscar winner with “Inglourious Basterds” and shortly afterwards thanks to “Django Unchained”. Waltz celebrated his beginnings in the TV business primarily in crime series such as “Kommissar Rex”, “Derrick” or “Polizeiruf 110”. However, he does not look back nostalgically on this era of his work, as has made it unmistakably clear.

For very pragmatic reasons, he only took it on at all: “I had to support my family, so I had no problem taking crappy jobs.” Lasting consequences, he is sure, but would have left them if he had stayed true to this genre: “The chance that I would end up as a cantankerous, bitter old man was quite high, so I’m all the happier about having escaped it .”

Many series, little bandwidth

A major shortcoming is the very limited selection of roles, which prevails despite the wide range of German-language crime thriller productions: “There are endless police series on German television. But it seems that there are more regional police series in Germany than anywhere else on in the world. So for what felt like an eternity, I played either local cops or local killers.”

One thing is certain: there is nothing regional about Christoph Waltz’s career anymore. Since “Inglourious Basterds”, all of Hollywood has been vying for the native Viennese, even becoming the notorious Bond super villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld in 2015 in “James Bond 007: Spectre”. Only in February of this year did the series “The Consultant” start on Amazon Prime Video, in which Waltz played the leading role.