Katarina Witt and Lavinia Nowak: This is how the sports star reacted to the TV star

The TV biopic “Kati – A Freestyle That Remains” is worth seeing and will be released today (26 September) in the ZDF/ARD media library. The TV broadcast is planned for 3 October. But no matter how and when you watch the film, one thing is certain: the visual similarity between the Munich actress Lavinia Nowak (29) and the real former GDR figure skating star Katarina “Kati” Witt (58) will amaze everyone.

Even Kati Witt felt the same way, as Nowak tells us in an interview with spot on news. “Katarina was completely enthusiastic during our first Skype conversation and immediately called someone over and said: ‘Look, you have to see this. It can’t be true.'”

One of 800 possible candidates

The actress says that skating skills were not important in the casting for this special character, a living legend. However, the production did place value on a visual similarity and so a lot of candidates were involved. “Someone recently told me how many actresses were invited to the casting. There were an incredible number. They cast around 800 people for the role,” reveals Nowak.

First there was a pure e-casting round, for which actresses with similar looks were asked to the acting agencies. Nowak was also suggested by her previous agency. Then the usual long wait began: “After this e-casting I didn’t hear anything for a long time, but I didn’t think anything of it. On average one in ten e-castings works out,” she reveals.

“But then I was invited to the live casting with the director in Munich – I arrived in a complete snowstorm, I remember it very well,” she says. Afterwards there was a third casting round in Berlin with Dagmar Manzel (66), who had already been cast as Witt’s trainer Jutta Müller (1928-2023)… That was it, Lavinia Nowak was confirmed as Kati Witt.

Impressive dialect

Not only does Lavinia Nowak look incredibly similar to Katarina Witt in the film, her dialect is also impressive – even though Nowak was born in Munich. “When the role became more concrete, I only focused on Katarina. I looked closely at her older interviews in particular and meticulously noted how she pronounced things,” the actress says of the preparation.

She also watched some of the newer talk show appearances, but: “Her dialect has become less pronounced over time and so I preferred to concentrate on the older sequences.” Nowak admits that she could have spoken more Saxon, “but we decided to speak the dialect as lightly as possible so that it doesn’t come to the fore too much.”