Udo Wachtveitl: The clichés in “Tatort” bother him

Actor Udo Wachtveitl (66) is annoyed by “crime scene” clichés. He tells this in the issue of the weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”, which appears on December 31st. The special feature edition features, among other things, people who have given up or are giving up their office or profession in 2024 or 2025. Wachtveitl will film his last Munich “crime scene” next year. He has been playing in the popular crime series in Erste since 1991, but he struggles with some of the clichés in the scripts.

“They do bother me, the clichés. I’ve rarely seen a rich, likeable person in ‘Tatort’, for example. But if the reality of crime is so different from what viewers experience on other channels, that’s a problem, a distortion of reality.” says the actor playing Inspector Franz Leitmayr. “You have to be curious about the world as it really is. And tell us about it.”

He doesn’t look at his “crime scenes” himself, neither the old ones nor the new ones. But for his other reason: “I don’t like to see myself. I don’t like it.” Until ten years ago he had to take part in press screenings by Bayerischer Rundfunk. “That was terrible for me.”

His colleague Miroslav Nemec (70) will also say goodbye with him after the 100th episode, which will be filmed in 2025. Wachtveitl wonders whether such a pair of investigators would still be cast like this. “A few years later, two white guys of about the same age and similar disposition might not have been done that way anymore. The zeitgeist would have demanded that at least one of them be a woman. Or that things had to be more diverse “But that is not automatically a sign of quality.” He often notices “such a desire for originality” in “Tatort” films, there must still be this quirk and that exquisite mental deformation of a character, which strikes me as a sign of embarrassment because one couldn’t think of a really gripping story. One should “not overstretch the genre rules”.

How the two long-serving actors will say goodbye to the Sunday evening series remains exciting. Because: “It hasn’t been decided yet,” he says in “Die Zeit”. “But we would like to go without a dramatic increase.” However, the decision to say goodbye after almost 35 years and leave “as long as people still think it’s a shame” is the right one. “It now fits in every respect. The ceiling will probably not fall on his head, after all, he has already worked on other projects in addition to “Tatort”. “For example, I have now translated an Asterix into Munich; That was a lot of fun.”