Jonas Nay

Martin Rauch, an East German agent sent West, stands in the aisle of a supermarket in Deutschland (2015) and looks at the shelves. Jonas Nay does almost nothing with the moment. He does not gape, he does not reach for anything, and the scene is not played for a laugh. We were moved by it more than we expected to be by a scene about groceries, because his face lets you watch a young man realise that what he was told about this place was not true, and decide to keep that to himself. That is what Nay does. He plays people who are a step behind the plot and shows you the second they catch up.

He came to acting sideways. A newspaper casting call in 2004 led to a child part in the NDR series Vier gegen Z (2005–06), and he never went to drama school; his training was in film-music composition and jazz piano, and he still composes and plays in bands. "Making music has always been my passion, my acting career began later and by coincidence," he has said, and there is something of it in how he acts: he knows when to hold still. The lead in the television film Homevideo (2011), as a bullied teenager, was his breakthrough. König von Deutschland (2013) took him into cinemas, and We Are Young. We Are Strong. (2014) put him among the leads of a film about the 1992 Rostock-Lichtenhagen attacks. Then came Martin.

Deutschland 83 and its sequels Deutschland 86 (2018) and Deutschland 89 (2020), all from creators Anna and Jörg Winger, remain the best case for him. Martin is not a natural spy and not a fool, and Nay resists both, giving us a decent, obedient young man who is startled to find he has a talent for lying. Opposite Maria Schrader's Lenora, dry and quite without shame about using her own family, he is the one who still blushes, and their scenes carry more charge than the plots around them. By the end of the first season we were hoping a Stasi agent would get away with it and were not comfortable about that, which is the show's point and largely his doing. The later seasons travel further and land less often, but he is never the reason they falter.

Since then the parts have been heavier: Max in Persian Lessons (2020), an SS officer in The Tattooist of Auschwitz (2024), with Transatlantic (2023) and Bookish (2025) between them. We have not reviewed them and will not judge them here. What we can say is that his casting runs in a narrow lane, young men caught in the gears of German history, from the bullied boy to the spy to the man in the uniform, and the lane suits him almost too well. Nobody has yet asked him to play someone with nothing at stake. We would like to see it, if only to find out whether the stillness is his or the century's.