August Diehl (born January 4, 1976 in West Berlin) is a German stage and screen actor.
He spent his childhood between Germany, Austria and France, and graduated at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst Ernst Busch (Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts) in Berlin.
He's been acting in both films and prestigious theatres in Germany, Austria and Switzerland since 1998, and his international break happened in 2009 with his role as Gestapo major Hellstrom in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds.
His brother Jakob is also an actor. He is not related to American actor John Diehl.
Selected filmography:
- Anatomy 2 (2003) as Benjamin "Benny" Sachs
- Mouth to Mouth (2005) as Tiger
- The Counterfeiters (2007) as Adolf Burger
- A Woman in Berlin (2008) as Gerd
- Inglourious Basterds (2009) as Major Dieter Hellstrom
- Salt (2010) as Mike Krause
- En mai, fais ce qu'il te plait (2015) as Hans
- Allied (2016) as Hobar
- Close to the Enemy (2016) as Dieter Koehler
- The Young Karl Marx (2017) as Karl Marx
- Kursk (2018) as Anton Markov
- Perfume (2018) as Moritz de Vries
- The Emperor of Paris (2018) as Nathanael de Wenger
- Bauhaus - Die Neue Zeit (2019) as Walter Gropius
- A Hidden Life (2019) as Franz Jägerstätter
- The King's Man (2021) as Vladimir Lenin
- Munich - The Edge of War (2022) as Franz Sauer
Tropes in his works:
- Period Piece:
- He seems to be a go-to-guy for roles in films set in World War II or just before, though he's not typecast as a Nazi. His roles in that field have covered the whole Nazi-to-Resistant spectrum, including a Gestapo officer, several unpoliticized soldiers, a conscientious objector and at least one Jew.
- Plus films like The Young Karl Marx (Victorian Britain / Revolutions of 1848), The Emperor of Paris (Napoleonic era), The King's Man (World War I) and Bauhaus - Die Neue Zeit (The Roaring '20s / Weimar Republic). He's perhaps the only actor who can claim to have played two iconic figures of Communism, Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin.
- Star-Making Role: He was acting in Germany for over a decade by this point, but Major Dieter Hellstrom from Inglourious Basterds brought him international attention.
