Actor Götz Otto (54) plays the leading role in the episode, Captain Hajo Kessler, in "Tatort: Das Verhör" (September 4, 8:15 p.m., the first). In the Ludwigshafen thriller, he plays a cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors Lena Odenthal (Ulrike Folkerts, 61) and her colleague Johanna Stern (Lisa Bitter, 38). Before the two, the artist, who was born in Offenbach, Hesse, had already driven international stars to insanity.
One of them was Pierce Brosnan (69) in "James Bond - Tomorrow Never Dies" (1997). Götz Otto played in the secret agent film Stamper, one of the assistants of the British media mogul and Bond opponent Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce, 75).
Carver wants world domination and instigates a war between China and the United Kingdom with his elusive stealth ship in the South China Sea. While planting mines on the ship, Bond is nearly killed by the passionately torturing Stamper, but escapes. Later, when Bond tries to defuse a missile on board, Stamper surprises him again. There is a final fight between the two on the rocket launch pad, where Bond has meanwhile placed the detonators for the mines. He sticks a knife in Stamper's stomach and jumps overboard. Shortly thereafter, the rocket ignites, the mines detonate and the ship explodes - with Stamper...
It was with this role that Götz Otto became known. That opened doors internationally. "I was really happy about that," he once said in an interview with "Münchner Merkur".
He should have been happy when he even got the role. And how that came about, he told in 2013 in an interview with the magazine "Focus". His most present memory was "the casting with the producer Barbara Broccoli in London". He only had twenty seconds to introduce himself. It was so absurd and he had no idea what to say. "And since the list of my previous career stages would not have filled twenty seconds, I put everything on one card and said: 'I'm big, I'm bad, I'm bald, I'm German. Five seconds, keep the Rest." (Eng. "I'm big, I'm bad, I'm brave, I'm German. Five seconds, keep the rest." It worked.
But his filmography alongside this prestige project is also impressive: it includes "Schindler's List" (1993, seven Oscars) and "Downfall" (2004, Oscar nomination for "Best Foreign Language Film").
After Bond, numerous engagements in international productions followed, such as "The Girl of Your Dreams" (1998) with the Spanish film star Penélope Cruz (48), the US-British fantasy film "Beowulf" (1999) with Christopher Lambert (65), the Spanish-French Feature film "The Girl and the Artist" (2012) with Claudia Cardinale (84) and the award-winning French film "Maman und Ich" (2013) with Diane Kruger (46). For the German-Chilean thriller series "Dignity" (2019-2020) about the Christian sect Colonia Dignidad, Götz Otto was in front of the camera with Devid Striesow (48), among others.
The father of four and Bavarian by choice lives with his wife near Munich. Götz Otto can also often be seen on German TV and film, including in: "Hubert without Staller (2013, 2019), "For Heaven's sake" (2017), "Unter Deutschen Betten" (2017), "Munich murder: On the street, at night, alone" (2017), "There's nothing" (2020) or Joseph Vilsmaier's (1939-2020) last feature film "Der Boandlkramer und die Eternal Love" (2021) and the Franconian "crime scene: Why" (2022).
And Götz Otto has also played in the Bavarian hit daily soap "Dahoam is Dahoam" (since 2007, BR). In 2016, the six-foot-tall actor slipped into the role of Michigan's "Little Joe" for a few episodes. Little Joe, who knew Vroni Brunner (Senta Auth, 48) from before and still admires him, suddenly appeared in the fictional town of Lansing, which her friend Roland Bamberger (Horst Kummeth, 65) didn't like at all...
In contrast to his many international films, "Dahoam is Dahoam" is a comparatively small, but in any case very local, production. When asked about this, Götz Otto told the news agency spot on news on the sidelines of the shooting: "Why not? It's a nice format that many viewers like to see."
