Author Topic: Free Fall - Freier Fall  (Read 1101046 times)

Offline mariska

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1230 on: July 06, 2015, 08:06:01 am »

Offline mariska

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1231 on: July 06, 2015, 08:09:32 am »
Someone put this on tumblr. Obviously the person who wrote it tried to write facts but too bad it is a biased own interpretation in some parts  >:(


My biographical sketch of Max Riemelt
Max was born in 1984 in East Berlin. He’s lived in Berlin all his life.

Max’ parents are Gunnar Riemelt (*1955) and Judith (*1957) (I don’t know what his mother’s maiden name is – she still goes by “Judith Riemelt”). Both Gunnar and Judith are graphic designers. Max’ mother and father divorced shortly after Max’ birth, before he was one year old. Max has said that he still had a very sheltered childhood. Max grew up around Gendarmenmarkt with his mother.

About his first childhood years in the still communist GDR (Max was 5 years old when the Berlin Wall came down), Max said that it was “just my childhood” and that people have misconceptions about what it was like. Max argues that most people who were not political felt free or “just normal” and did not feel like “victims all the time”. He does feel “different” from West Germans sometimes and says that they e.g. have a different sense of humor.
Max has never afaik described where he was or what he did or how his family reacted when the Wall came down. He said that the biggest difference were the shops. He can still recall the weird excitement when a certain type of supermarket made it to his neighborhood.

Max first acted in a stage play at his elementary school and then in a children’s play in a children’s acting group lead by “a family friend” at age 11. When he was 11 his younger brother Lukas was born (in 1995). Lukas played Max’ character as a child in “In the face of crime”. Lukas is Max’ half-brother by his mother, but he still goes by “Lukas Riemelt”. 
When he was 13 years old, a woman who is in various interviews either described as “an acquaintance” or as “stepmother” or as his “mother”, took him and his stepsister to a casting. (My guess is that this was a former partner of his father – his father is currently married to a woman named Birgit and they don’t appear to have kids.) He wasn’t chosen, but the child talent agency decided to sign him up and he was invited to further castings. Max shot for 70 days straight for his very first role. He said that he fell into a black hole after it was over. He felt as if he’d found all these amazing people who then suddenly abandoned him - a certain superficiality of connections within the film industry where everyone is superclose during filming and the next day people can have no contact to one another anymore when filming is over. He hated returning to school in between film projects. He said that he was arrogant during this time and that his saving grace was the psychologist that had to assess him daily on set (a legal requirement for child actors in Germany). He said that she really helped him. After seeing Max in one of his first roles in 1998 (“Zwei allein”), two boys who were the same age as Max started a fanclub. These two still today run Max’ official facebook page (he has no involvement) and his website. As a “thank you” and recognition for their effort, Max meets them once a year for dinner. Max refuses to start any public social media accounts and says that he never will. Max is otherwise uncomfortable with fandom and has stated several times that he wants people to pretend that they do not know him when they first meet him in a club or at a party etc. 

Max was terrible in school. His school was the Charles Darwin School in Berlin Mitte (Mitte being a neighborhood, think “Notting Hill”, “Brooklyn”), which doesn’t exist anymore and the building has been demolished. Max abandoned his high school three years before he would have graduated to do full time acting (he would’ve been 16 years old).

Max loves football/soccer and used to play in a local youth team.

When he was 17 years old, Max decided that he didn’t want to live with his mother and younger brother Lukas anymore and moved out and into his own flat. Living alone at age 17. This was also when Max’ uncle (I’m guessing his mother’s brother here, Max pretty much never mentions his father) took Max to kickboxing, which became Max’ One True Love. He says that he needed kickboxing as therapy and to feel himself. He said that during this time period in his life, he felt like his life had no structure and that kickboxing gave him something to hold onto.

He later tried to get his diploma, which took him years. Max said that he simply doesn’t have the attention span for school and academic stuff. He then tried it at a private evening school. I think he was successful at the end, but not sure. 

Max doesn’t like the stage and wants to be purely a film/camera actor. He did the stage film “Nachtasyl” (“night asylum”) in which he plays a gay male teen prostitute.

Max is somewhat typecast usually in two ways: a) hottie love interest and b) fighter, often soldier and police officer. Usually both. The typecasting always somehow focuses on his “physicality”. His body. There are films, in which he doesn’t play a fighter/cop/soldier, yet it’s still about his body and fighting – like in the films in which he plays athletes. Max plays a police officer or soldier or fighter in “We are the night”, “Napola”, “Free Fall”, “Auslandseinsatz”, “Mörderischer Frieden”, “Feinde”, in “GG19”, “Sense8”, “An die Grenze” and may other movies. For reasons completely unclear to me, he also gets typecast as Russian (he plays a Russian Jewish police officer in “In the face of crime”, a Russian gangster in “Sense8”, in “Nachtasyl” he plays a Russian gay male teenage prostitute (Aljoscha), in “Fourth Estate” he plays yet another Russian etc).

Max is known to be a complete maniac, who needs to “feel his limits” all the time. During the filming of “The Wave”, he once had a nosebleed that went on almost the entire time for three days straight. He refused to get medical attention and instead insisted that the blood gets wiped off in between takes. People started getting worried about the blood loss, but he refused to get medical attention.
Max is one of those people who confuses disordered eating with “I’m-a-serious-actor” and thus has gained and lost weight through crazy diet fasting, running until your legs give out etc yadda yadda several times.

He does kickboxing religiously, six days a week for several hours, at the same place that pretty much all major German actors train at in Berlin (including e.g. Ben Becker. Hanno Koffler, Max’ co-star in “Free Fall”). 

Max’ breakthrough role was Napola and he was European Shooting Star in 2005 for that. (Anyone who follows my tumblr knows that I’m a European Shooting Star nerd, anyone who’s into arthouse cinema should follow the awards.)

He wasn’t sure about being an actor for a few years and said that he was unhappy about this. He said that it just all felt very weird to him since he had never gone to an acting school and knew so many people who had extensive training. He then after a few years made a decision that yes, he’d stay with acting – for life.

Journalists have accused him of inauthenticity, but then get “blackballed” by Max for future interviews, so try to mute their criticism.

Max “I-wanna-be-a-serious-actor” shtick leads to some rather silly interview situations, when for the umpteenth time Max tries to explain why he TOTALLY wasn’t typecast yet again and why this role his TOTALLY different. Uh-uh.

Max mentions a girlfriend in several older interviews. I have no idea whether this was always the same woman or different women. He e.g. said that he did an HIV test after his girlfriend asked him and that his girlfriend was West German. The girlfriend or a girlfriend got pregnant in 2007. From the interviews my guess is that this wasn’t planned and rather an accident. Max never speaks about wanting to have kids, be a father or deciding to start trying for a kid. He gave off a “bros before hos” vibe to several journalists. He kind of “closeted” his girlfriend/babymama- she was never allowed to be identified as his girlfriend and officially accompany him to the premieres of his films or to celebrate his achievements at awards shows or… She was never named. She just remained in this closet situation and raised their daughter.  Max explicitly said that he would not take any proper time out from acting cause his career was more important to him. So his active role as a father seems to have been limited. Again, the career of his girlfriend/babymama was never discussed. He admitted to not have seen his daughter for months on end. Similar to the girlfriend/babymama closet his daughter is never named. She is 7 years now, so would’ve been born in ca. 2008. Max has said that he has never taken her to a set. There were rumors of trouble in Max’ relationship, not least when Max said that he would go party in Israel with a buddy (actually Max Mauff who plays “Felix” in Sense8 afaik – Max Mauff had filmed “Hannas Reise” there) for Christmas and New Year’s instead of spending it with his daughter and girlfriend. Shortly afterwards, Max broke up with his girlfriend/babymama (in 2012 – or that’s at least when he publicly admitted that he had ended the relationship).

Max was abroad a lot recently – he’s filmed in Ukraine, Mexico, India and Morocco. He said that filming in Marrakech wasn’t exactly what he had envisioned due to the sex tourism there (I wasn’t aware Marrakech had that issue).

Max loves the Museum for Modern Art, Berlinische Galerie, and has done literature readings as part of the exhibitions there several times. (The black and white pictures of Max reading are from one of them).

He likes cooking, especially Thai food, and said that he would have become a cook if acting hadn’t worked out.

Max has said that he loves rap.

His favorite actors are John Malkovich and Leonardo di Caprio. Max has never seen Titanic in full, cause he hates it so much. He thinks it’s utter trash.

Max is rather short.

Max has precisely ZERO queer sensibilities, although he has played homoerotic Napola and gay seducer Kay. Like embarrassingly clueless about any actual gay … stuff. Offensively facepalmy in some of his “Free Fall” interviews. If 1 was straight and 10 was gay, Max would achieve a -4.

Since I posted this @scaredofuhlek has pointed me to an old comment from 2011 asserting that Max Riemelt is privately extremely homophobic and that he has known Max for years from sports (either an association or a gym, unclear). I could trace that commenter relatively easily as his twitter handle is the same and he gives his real name on twitter. The commenter seems to be gay himself and does live in Berlin. He lived for many years in the small hamlet that Max’ father lives in.   

He’s moved around in Berlin quite a lot recently: From Mitte to Kreuzberg to Friedrichshain.

Max is a declared pacifist and for that reason was a conscientious objector for the German military draft (which has since been abolished completely anyways). He never performed the civil service (working with disabled people, the elderly, orphans etc.) which used to be mandatory, although he said he would have liked to.

Similarly, Max is a declared atheist. He doesn’t believe in a god of any kind. He says that he doesn’t disavow that “something” that we can’t explain exists, but thinks calling that god is ludicrous. 

Offline morrobay

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1232 on: July 07, 2015, 06:31:27 pm »
this is the part I believe-

Max was born in 1984
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"I don't care if you shoot up."

Offline morrobay

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1233 on: July 19, 2015, 09:00:26 pm »
it's a long interview, but Max is in there several times.  He seems uncomfortable, but cute too  :)


[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtpaU2w8vgc[/youtube]
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"I don't care if you shoot up."

Offline mariska

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1234 on: July 20, 2015, 07:40:43 pm »
Yes I watched the hangout. Funny how shy Max seems to be. But adorable and cute  ::)



Offline natty

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1235 on: August 22, 2015, 09:53:21 am »

Offline mariska

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1236 on: September 13, 2015, 11:01:24 am »
This is so cute. Hanno in a clip and the little girl is his daughter in real life.

t=70

Offline morrobay

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1237 on: September 13, 2015, 04:59:09 pm »
I think this was posted somewhere before, but didn't think "cute" (??).  Guy takes off in Hanno's van so he's left w/nothing, has to fight and loses....sad, I thought. Maybe I read it wrong.
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"I don't care if you shoot up."

Offline mariska

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1238 on: September 14, 2015, 05:16:25 am »
I remember this was posted before, but I didn't know the girl was his real daughter. That's what I think it's cute, the girl and to see the two of them together, not the video itself.

Offline morrobay

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Re: Free Fall - Freier Fall
« Reply #1239 on: September 14, 2015, 09:30:55 am »
oh, gotcha - -yeah, to see him with his daughter is adorable. 

I'm a little surprised he let her be in such a traumatic video, though.  I'm sure she knows it's all make-believe, but still, she's so young.
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
"I don't care if you shoot up."