Berlin Shooting Star Katharina Stark Always Knew She Wanted to Be an Actress
Apparently, there is a Santa Claus. At least for Katharina Stark. For the German actress, picked as one of this year’s European Shooting Stars set to be honored at the 2024 Berlinale as among the continent’s 10 best up-and-coming actors, being in the movies was her Christmas wish.
“I always, always wanted to act, to be in the movies. From as far back as I can remember, I would watch movies, and I wanted to be in them, to live inside them,” says Stark. “So when I was eight years old, that’s what I wished for: to be an actress. My parents gave me a gift certificate, where they wrote they would do everything they could to support my dream and that they would always support me.”
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Stark’s folks came through, chauffeuring little Katharina from their town of Illertissen (population 16,000) in rural Bavaria, 90 minutes into Munich, the nearest media hub, for acting classes and auditions.
“Our town was a long way from the film industry; it was basically a few farms and lots of cows,” she recalls. “There wasn’t even a school — we had to go to the next village for that. So it took a while for me to figure out how things work, to get an agent, etc. It was years later when I got my first role, at 15.”
Her debut, as Similde in the German fantasy film King Laurin, drew positive reviews, and Stark began to work her way up in the business, taking one-off roles in such popular television procedurals as Tatort and Soko Munchen.
When she graduated from high school, she enrolled in the Otto-Falckenberg School of the Performing Arts in Munich but continued to do TV. While still at school, Stark auditioned for the role that would take her to the next level in this year’s The Interpreter of Silence.
Set in Frankfurt in 1963, the five-part series centers on Eva Bruhns (Stark), a 24-year-old enjoying the excitement of Germany’s postwar economic boom who gets a job as a Polish-to-German interpreter in the Auschwitz trials, the first-ever prosecution of Nazi war criminals by German authorities. The eyewitness testimony of Holocaust survivors forces Eva to question the foundations of her country’s newly formed democracy and to confront her family’s own involvement in the genocide.
The Interpreter of Silence bowed on Hulu in the U.S. and on Disney+ worldwide and was nominated for a Critics Choice Award for best international series this year.
“Eva was my first lead role in a series, so it was a big step for me — but also because of the role itself,” says Stark. “Up till then, I had little opportunity to do really political stories. I learned about the Holocaust in school, of course, but preparing for the role, I realized how deeply all of us, as Germans, are connected to this history. Speaking to my grandparents, I could see how difficult it still is for people to speak about this time, about what happened.”
The recordings of the entire Auschwitz trial are on YouTube, and Stark watched all of the proceedings while reading the trial transcripts. Her character is based on a real person, the Polish translator in the trial.
“I didn’t try to imitate her. [Series creator] Annette Hess said it wouldn’t make sense because Eva is a fictional character,” says Stark. “But I was fascinated by how she worked, how she tried to mirror the people she was translating — she really gave me an idea of the profession of a translator and how it works in practice.”
Meanwhile, Stark learned Polish for the role. “I had weeks of coaching so I could understand the lines I was speaking and not just do it phonetically,” she says. “I can’t speak fluently, but I can follow it, which was needed so I could react to what the other actors are saying in Polish in real-time.”
A bigger challenge, she says, was to bear the responsibility for an entire series and to keep track of each episode’s story arc even as the production shot out of sequence. “Some days we’d do scenes from three different episodes, one after another, and it was a struggle to keep an overview of the whole story and how everything fit together,” she notes.
The success of the show — and the attention from the Shooting Stars nomination — means producers and casting agents worldwide may begin to take notice of the 25-year-old from Illertissen. Stark says she’d love to work in English.
“The White Lotus, Succession, Fleabag — almost all the TV and most of the films I watch are American or British,” she says. “I find particularly the U.S. series so incredibly well-written, funny but with a lot of political critique cleverly woven in, socially critical but also wildly entertaining. … I’d love to do it all: dramatic, funny, even romantic roles, but I also think it’s important to consider the social impact of the stories you tell.”
Stark has also begun to write, working on the scripts for short films, and hopefully, soon a feature, which her sister will direct.
That first Christmas wish came true. So Stark should have at least two more goes from Santa.
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