Liv Lisa Fries

The first thing Fries does in a scene is look. Charlotte Ritter in Babylon Berlin (2017) types at police headquarters by day, works the Moka Efti by night and climbs home to a tenement where too many Ritters share too few beds, and Fries gives all three lives the same fast, appraising glance, as if each is a job interview she intends to pass. She is never a victim in that series, not for a frame. What she is instead is someone counting: money, exits, the distance between where she stands and where she means to be.

She had been working for a decade before anyone outside Germany noticed. She began in 2005, with a television debut in Schimanski (2006), then The Wave (2008), She Deserved It (2010), Romeos (2011) and Zurich (2013), where she played Lea, a young woman with cystic fibrosis. Then Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Henk Handloegten cast her as Charlotte, and Babylon Berlin ran for five seasons, from 2017 to 2026, opposite Volker Bruch. Since then she has stayed largely in the first half of the twentieth century: a pathologist in Hinterland (2021), Munich – The Edge of War (2021), Freud's Last Session (2023) and the lead in Andreas Dresen's From Hilde, with Love (2024) as Hilde Coppi, a real member of the Red Orchestra.

What works is the plainness. Fries does not pose, and she does not underline; when Charlotte is frightened the fear is in the speed of her decisions rather than in her face. Bruch plays Gereon Rath closed and shaking, and for long stretches he is the least interesting person in his own story, so the series leans on her, and she carries it. She is known for preparing hard, learning dialects and changing her appearance, and it shows in the way Charlotte's Berlin comes out of her mouth as if she has never spoken anything else. We were moved, more than we expected by a costume drama, watching her come off a night at the Moka Efti and sit down at the typing pool without letting her face change; it was the not changing that did it.

Some early reviews wondered whether Charlotte was too good to be true, a heroine with no flat tyres. We think that misreads the performance. Fries plays her resourcefulness as appetite, not virtue, and appetite is not an idealising quality. If there is a reservation, it is that she has rarely been allowed out of period dress, and we would like to see what that appraising look does to a room with electricity in it.

Watch Babylon Berlin in German if you are given the choice. Her voice is half the performance, and dubbing takes it away.