Paula Beer

The teenager who didn't want to be an actress

Chris Kraus was looking for a raw look for Poll and found it on a Berlin playground in 2009. Paula Beer was fourteen years old and had no intention of pursuing acting. She accepted the audition because it meant she could skip math class, and she ended up leading a period drama about aristocracy in Estonia in 1914.

That performance earned her the Best Young Actress award in Bavaria. Critics praised her ability to hold the silence opposite veterans of the German stage. It was a trial by fire with no safety net.

Paula Beer then decided that acting was a way to live other lives without paying the consequences.

But her real international breakthrough didn't happen in her native language. In 2016, François Ozon cast her in the lead role of Frantz. The director was looking for someone who could capture the fragility of silent film actresses. Beer didn't speak French before she received the script, so she locked herself away for six weeks with a tutor to master the pronunciation and nuances of the language.

And the effort paid off at the Venice Film Festival.

She won the Marcello Mastroianni for Best Breakthrough Actress, and the French press stopped seeing her as a foreign promise and started treating her as a star in her own right. That film about grief and lies after World War I earned 11 César Award nominations in 2017. Beer became the first German actress nominated for Most Promising Actress in France.

The Berlin alliance with Petzold

In 2018, she began her most fruitful collaboration with director Christian Petzold. Filming Transit placed her in a timeless Marseille, where Nazi refugees mingled with modern aesthetics. Her chemistry with Franz Rogowski worked so well that the director decided to reunite the lead pair on his next project.

Undine arrived in 2020 to reimagine the myth of the water nymph in a Berlin of concrete and architectural models. Beer plays a historian who must kill the man who betrays her. For this role she received the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlinale, a recognition that placed her at the top of European auteur cinema.

She doesn't use social media to promote her private life.

She prefers to keep the public guessing about her personality so as not to taint her characters. In 2023, she worked with Petzold again on Afire, playing Nadja, an ice cream seller on the Baltic coast while a forest fire surrounds the house where a blocked writer is staying. The film won the Grand Jury Prize in Berlin.

Outside the festival circuit, she appeared in the series Bad Banks between 2018 and 2020. In this production she played a young investment banker in a world of adrenaline and financial betrayal. The series was sold to more than 40 countries and showed a much more aggressive, contemporary side of the actress.

And her willingness to take physical risks continued.

In 2023, she starred in Stella. A Life., a biographical drama about Stella Goldschlag, a Jewish woman who collaborated with the Gestapo by capturing other Jews in Nazi Berlin. It was a controversial role that divided critics over the coldness with which Beer approached moral survival. The production had a budget of €12 million.

For 2024, she worked on the film adaptation of Leurs enfants après eux under the direction of the Boukherma brothers. Filming took place in various towns in northeastern France during the summer to capture the atmosphere of Nicolas Mathieu's original novel. The film was scheduled for its premiere in the official selection of that year's Venice Film Festival.