André Hennicke is the man the other characters are afraid of: Nazis, killers and gangsters, in German television and in films that travel. We have mostly met him at the edge of the frame, where a few lines are enough to change the temperature of a scene.
Fi1m perspective
In Victoria (2015) he is a debt before he is a person. A phone rings, Boxer owes a man called Andi from his time in prison, the debt is due tonight and the job needs four, and from the moment the name is said Sebastian Schipper's long Berlin night stops being a night out. Schipper shot the whole film in one unbroken 138-minute take, so there was no cheating the arrival: when Hennicke walks in, he walks in live. We felt the film tighten when his name came up, before we had seen his face, and when we had seen it we understood the debt. It is a small part and it is the hinge.
He started in the GDR, at the Potsdam film school, after years as a stoker and a bricklayer, and broke through in 1988 as Mark Löwenthal in Die Schauspielerin for DEFA. Reunification sent him into television, and German television has never stopped casting him in crime series. From the mid-2000s the films got bigger and went further: Wilhelm Mohnke in Downfall (2004), the judge Roland Freisler in Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005), the killer Gabriel Engel in Antibodies (2005), then Professor Eugen Bleuler in David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (2011). Our review of that one, busy with Freud and Jung, did not stop for him, and we will not pretend now that it had.
What he brings is a solid physical presence and clipped, exact diction, which together read as authority, and underneath both the sense of a man at war with himself. That is why the villains stay with people, and he knows it: audiences, he has said, remember the bad roles better. He has also explained why he likes them. "Antagonisten sind unangepasst und tragen mehr Konflikte mit sich herum." Antagonists do not fit in, and they carry more conflict around with them. Christian Petzold has cast him three times and Christian Alvart twice, and directors of that sort do not go back to an actor for a snarl.
The one thing said against him is that he is typecast, which is a complaint about casting directors rather than about him. He has done sympathetic work when asked, notably in Something to Remind Me (2001), and he is still working in cinema and in series into the mid-2020s, still saying he wants characters with as many inner conflicts as possible. German television keeps giving him murderers. The films that travel give him uniforms. Somebody should give him the lead and a reason to be kind, and see whether the audience still remembers.
Biography
André Hennicke is a German actor. He studied acting at the Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen "Konrad Wolf" in Potsdam-Babelsberg from 1980 to 1984, after earlier work as a heizer and bricklayer.
He has appeared in more than one hundred films and television productions since 1984. Notable roles include SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Mohnke in Downfall (2004), Judge Roland Freisler in Sophie Scholl – The Final Days (2005), Professor Eugen Bleuler in A Dangerous Method (2011), and Andi in Victoria (2015). He received the German Television Award for best actor for his performance in the 2001 television film Something to Remind Me.
