A portrait of actor Dana Herfurth

To say that 2025 was a good year for Dana Herfurth would be an understatement. The actor, born in Lower Saxony in 1998 and raised in The Hague, Netherlands, received the New Faces Award in May; then Kirill Serebrennikov’s THE DISAPPEARANCE OF JOSEF MENGELE, in which she plays a supporting role, had its world premiere in Cannes. In September, the highly acclaimed and successful series CALL MY AGENT BERLIN, in which she is part of the regular cast, premiered on Disney+. At Hamburg Film Festival, the curtain then rose on EASY GIRL, Hille Norden’s feature film debut, which was subsequently shown at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival as well.

EASY GIRL is a very special production, not only because in it, Herfurth plays her biggest cinema role to date. The director gives an account of sexual abuse – based on personal experiences. “I understood the protagonist Nore immediately, even though I haven’t experienced the same things as her or Hille,” the actress tells me during our conversation in a Berlin café. “But as a wom­an, you are always aware of some sexual harassment, as well as all the mechanisms of power games and microaggression that you can’t influence very much, especially as a young person.”

Norden is only 27 years old – like her leading actress – and in her film, she addresses topics such as trauma and difficult healing processes, friendship, and self-discovery. But she stays well away from cliché, working in an unusual and surprising manner; the film is life-affirming and electrifying, colourful and surprisingly humorous. “When I read the script, I knew immediately that I just had to play this role, I got sucked right into the story,” Herfurth recalls. “I couldn’t escape it; every scene was so full of vitality. That’s not always the case: with young female characters in particular, sooner or later you tend to realise that the whole thing was written by some fifty-year-old man sitting in his office. Here, on the other hand, everything seemed so real and authentic, even though it plays with fantasy quite a bit, which totally fascinated me.”

For Herfurth, the role in EASY GIRL rep­resents the culmination of what has been – at least on paper – an astonishingly straightforward start to her career. “I had a hobby and a dream and thought, I’ll just give it a try!” That is how she sums up her early days as an actor, laughing as she speaks. It was a school course in perform­ing arts that awakened her interest. When she mov­ed to Bremen, the 16-year-old found school and everyday life boring and ’somehow insanely German’, but the local theatre had its own youth club. “So, I called them, went along, and it became like a second home for me over the next few years. The theatre can also be a gathering place for everyone who doesn’t quite fit in elsewhere.”

“I have always been very determined; that’s part of my character. But I’ve also been lucky with my timing over the past seven years,” she con­tinues. After leaving high school, she applied to the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin because she had heard that it was the biggest acting academy in Germany, as well as having the best reputation – and she was promptly accepted. Following her graduation, armed with the tools of the trade and a healthy dose of self-confidence, she continued along the same path: rather than a permanent theatre position, she decided to go freelance and pursue film work, which was made possible initially by a support­ing role in the series LOVE ADDICTS. She also appeared in Timm Kröger’s Venice Competition entry THE UNIVERSAL THEORY.

Meanwhile, the Berliner-by-choice is looking – in her own words – for roles and projects “that really do something for me, touch me, make me think, or just amuse me. I’m attracted to challenges and things I’ve never done before. But above all, I am drawn to characters I can fall in love with.” Whether these are in unusual, perhaps somewhat unwieldy productions such as EASY GIRL or in more mainstream work like CALL MY AGENT BERLIN or Simon Verhoeven’s upcoming film adaptation of the bestseller ACH DIESE LÜCKE, DIESE VERDAMMTE LÜCKE is secondary. “But who knows, maybe I’ll give up the job at some point because I feel as if I’ve done and seen it all,” she says as she takes her leave, a smile on her face. Given how tenacious Herfurth has been in pursuing her career so far, though, it is hard to believe it will be ending in the foreseeable future.

Patrick Heidmann