Alice Dwyer

Mokkabar, Kreuzberg, Berlin. Alice Dwyer is wearing jeans, a simple top and her hair loose. She looks natural and sensual, like a young woman who can get along well without putting on a show. She was the one to choose our meeting place, and in a way this alternative, multicultural and perhaps most honest part of Berlin seems representative of her mentality: “I grew up in Schoeneberg and Kreuzberg and I still wouldn’t want to live in any other part of Berlin.” Why is that? “Because of the different types of people, because of the many social strata, professions and cultures. But I am rather concerned to see that even this district is slowly becoming more and more chic.”

Does she believe that this bastion can be preserved? “Ick hoffe” (I hope so) she answers with an original Berlin accent, beaming broadly.

Hers is a smile that always includes an echoing touch of sympathetic melancholy, as if she is thinking hard to herself about what she has just said. She appears surprisingly adult for a girl of just over 21, conveying a maturity that has surely been shaped by her now more than ten years working as an actress: “It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I began to make films together with people of my own age, before that it was always with adults. I don’t understand people who say that you miss out on your childhood. I think it is a different kind of childhood, a different kind of growing up. It wasn’t quicker, but it was different. I am very grateful for it.” One asks oneself where, at the age of only nine, she found the assurance to bridge a lean time of two years without any doubts in herself ? “I suppose it was my stubborn determination not to give up. My defiant refusal to admit to failure.”

Dwyer believed in herself – and after her first roles, the industry believed in her, too: “After 'Baby', suddenly people recognized me, and also came up and spoke to me. Overnight, I was looked at more closely at castings. I just thought to myself: “Wow, so this is how it works.” Afterwards, attempts were made to pin her down to lascivious roles (“sometimes that has been made to look more extreme than it actually was”), but in the subsequent years Dwyer decided in favor of a remarkably multifaceted series of no-budget, low-budget and independent films, which earned her the reputation of a perceptive, up-and-coming talent for complex roles. Even in numerous TV films, she demonstrated a talent for choosing exacting material with astonishing frequency. “I think it would be a shame to feel bad about acting in TV productions as well,” Dwyer muses. “I try to avoid that attitude. It’s a kind of arrogance that is actually quite ridiculous.” As far as her actual work as an actress is concerned, she doesn’t differentiate between the media to any extent, and for that very reason, the words that she has often heard ‘Of course, we are only making TV programs’ also make her extremely annoyed. “When TV is always made out to be so bad, it should motivate us even more to make it better!”

Coming from many other young women, this statement would sound like a platitude, but in Dwyer’s case it sounds like an honest doctrine: “It would seem odd to me if I didn’t have those ideals. Perhaps it’s a matter of attitude, of what you’re aiming for, but if I take part in a project that I can only back half-heartedly, it makes me unhappy.” She demonstrates the same passion in her choice of films. There is a conscious tendency towards art, towards complex films with deep con- tent. “I do believe that there is a fresh breeze blowing through the industry, but in my eyes there are still far too many people who don’t have the courage to try things a different way sometimes,” Dwyer responds in answer to my question about the current state of German film and adds: “To be able to play as many facets as possible – sometimes it’s just not permitted.”

Dwyer is eloquent – but nevertheless, she often hesitates noticeably at the beginning of her sentences. Asked about the origin of her enthusiasm for acting she considers for around 15 seconds – and the time she takes to think it over appears honest. “I believe that when you’re acting, over and over again there are scenes that work out and you notice that while it is happening. They are just working; it’s impossible to explain it. You don’t know whether it is something to do with the screenplay or with your acting partner, but these occasional moments are some of the most satisfying you can ever experience.”

While Dwyer uses such fine words to express her ideas about acting, she also reveals considerable interest in her own development process. “What happens afterwards scares me more than anything else. When I cross a red carpet and people take photos, I find myself trembling terribly afterwards, because it is all too much for me. It unsettles me completely to be standing there as ‘myself ’ all of a sudden.” She much prefers continual transformation and permanent rediscovery in different people and in her life, she says, and explains: “I need that so much that I grow grumpy if I haven’t done any filming for a couple of months.” But I would like to know why exactly. “Perhaps it’s all about inner, emotional engagement?” Alice Dwyer laughs but then becomes serious again. “I don’t know what it is exactly. But I believe it’s true of almost every creative profession that you love. I’m already familiar with it from my mom, who is a painter. If she doesn’t go to her studio for a few weeks, she goes out of her mind. It’s almost as if your body is demanding it, somehow.”

A few minutes later, her mother actually comes along. Just by chance, on her way to her studio. She is wearing jeans with splashes of paint, a sign of her creativity. Dwyer, who was brought up bilingually, exchanges a few words of English with her mother from New Zealand, then smiles self-consciously and introduces us.

This brief moment of privacy observed by chance merely confirms the abiding media, or rather artistic aura of this young, up-and-coming talent: that of a down-to-earth, independently thinking and creative young woman whose charm and charisma mean she has a real chance: to make it right to the top.

Author: Johannes Bonke