Frederick Lau plays Berlin's rough young men from the inside, soft where the type is usually hard, and he is at his best when he lets someone else lead. Victoria (2015) is the proof, and he has not yet had a part to match it.
Fi1m perspective
Sonne, in Victoria (2015), is one of four men turned away from a Berlin club who talk a Spanish stranger into a night out. He brags, he steals beer from a kiosk, he drinks on a rooftop and falls over, and none of it is threatening. Lau plays him soft and tired, a man who has been out too long and knows it, and the reason Laia Costa's Victoria stays with him is that he looks as worn out as she does. It is not the showiest part in the film. Franz Rogowski's Boxer has the stillness, and the eye keeps going to him. Lau's job is to be the one she could plausibly leave with, and he does it without asking for credit.
He has been at this since he was ten, when he answered a newspaper advertisement for a children's television role, and by his mid-twenties he had appeared in more than fifty productions. Dennis Gansel's The Wave (2008), in which he played Tim, was the film that got him noticed. A Coffee in Berlin (2012) put him, as Ronny, in a well-liked ensemble. Then Sebastian Schipper's single take made him a lead, and since then he has moved between arthouse drama, comedy and television: Vince in 4 Blocks (2017), set in Neukölln, and Kipinski in The Captain (2018).
What he does is physical rather than verbal. He can turn from hard to gentle in a moment and back again, and directors keep casting him as the sharp-edged outsider from Berlin street life rather than anyone ordinary. He does not seem to mind. "I don't find normality particularly stimulating," he said in 2015, and the parts bear him out. We went into Victoria braced for a stunt and were restless by the forty-minute mark, while the men drank and bragged and the improvised talk ran thin. What kept us from giving up on Sonne was how little Lau pushed. In scenes built to be improvised, most actors fill every silence; he stood back and let Costa lead, and that is why she can carry the film.
The complaint made about him since, and we have some sympathy with it, is that he has spent too much of the time on mainstream comedies when the bolder work suited him better. His strengths are in pressure: the long take, the crowded scene, the group of men who have to seem like they have known each other for years by the second minute. Berlin keeps offering him its rough corners and he keeps taking them. We would like to see a director hand him the whole night rather than a quarter of it.
Biography
Frederick Lau is a German actor. Born on 17 August 1989 in Berlin, he began acting as a child and has appeared in more than 50 film and television roles since 2000.
He is known for his performances as Tim in The Wave (2008) and as Sonne in Victoria (2015). Lau received the German Film Award for both roles, as best supporting actor and best leading actor respectively. He has also won a Grimme Award and other television honours.
