A portrait of actor Mala Emde

These days, few other paths of success are as straight and upwardly steep as Mala Emde’s career. However, the actress cuts right to the chase when I comment on how smoothly things are going for her at the moment. “I don’t think life works like that,” she says during our interview in a kitchen in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. “It’s just that capitalism makes us believe things are always going upwards, and that everything always ought to get more and better.” Simple answers and easy solutions are not Emde’s thing, neither in conversation nor in her work, as she so clearly demonstrates. But it is not wrong to say that the Frankfurt native, born in 1996, has been enjoying a career high for several years now. In 2020, she was the lead actress in Julia von Heinz’s AND TOMORROW THE ENTIRE WORLD in competition at the Venice Film Festival, returning to the Lido two years later with SKIN DEEP by Alex Schaad. She won the German Television Award for the two seasons of the smart comedy series OH HELL, in which she starred as the protagonist. And the novel adaptation BLIND AT HEART by Barbara Albert was shown at the film festivals in Tokyo and Luxembourg, among others. One of the highlights to date: Emde’s most recent film KOELN 75 emerged as a real Berlinale hit in February 2025 – and she has now received her first nomination for the German Film Award for her role as Vera Brandes, who organized a legendary Keith Jarrett concert as a teenager in 1975.

Happy as she is about being nominated for a Lola, looking back at the past few years Emde is equally enthusiastic about other things. The variety of roles, the content of the stories, plus “the chance to keep developing and never stand still”, is how she describes it, “because I be­lieve there is nothing more important in life than those moments when you dare to try something new.” In the case of KOELN 75, this also meant that the graduate of the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin had to accept the possibility of failure. “Before this film, I always tried to create perfect characters that were new from the ground up, with as little of myself in them as possible,” she explains. “But then I noticed that many of my colleagues that I admire most – like Franz Rogowski or Vicky Krieps – always intro­duce a bit of themselves into their characters. Even if it’s just that they don’t try and learn the perfect accent. They may not be suitable for every role, but they bring in something that no one else can. I tried that for the first time in KOELN 75: I didn’t distance myself; I fused Mala and Vera together, so that I embodied the character as only I could have done, possible for me and no one else.“

Slipping into other roles is something Emde has been doing for a long time; she was eleven years old when she first faced the cameras. “When I watched a movie back then, I felt more alive afterwards,” she says, reminiscing about the origin of her passion for the profession. “I had the feeling that my whole body was more open and my view of things was different. Even the way someone picked up a cup in the movie suddenly developed significance. And I wanted to be someone who gave such things meaning. That’s still the case today.” The desire to be an actress is never the focus – it is the acting itself. Emde prefers to describe herself as a filmmaker, with a view to the collaborative aspect of filming. She has a great desire to work abroad in the future, especially after living in Paris for two and a half years. However, the concept of national borders in filmmaking seems as contrived to her as the notion of a straightforward career path: “Why should I allow myself to be restricted by countries in my job? I’m not interested in nations; I’m interested in people. We are all storytellers – and the way a story is told always depends on the person who tells it. Not where they come from.”

The next story Emde is telling has been filmed already: in the second half of the year, she will be appearing alongside Louis Hofmann and Katharina Stark in a Netflix production by director Markus Goller and author Oliver Ziegenbalg. It is about young people who employ their own initiative to save thousands of refugees from dis–tress at sea in the Mediterranean in 2015. And afterwards? The youthful anxiety that one day she may not be allowed to act anymore has disappeared for the time being, thanks to the successes of recent years. But now she is on the lookout even more for like-minded people to join her on her journey; people who have something to tell, “who are looking for poetry, or have their own special language”. And above all, she sums up as she says goodbye, “I’d just like to be surprised.”

Patrick Heidmann