What It’s Like to Play Heinrich Himmler: Martin Müller on Embodying Evil in ‘I Is Another’
Portraying one of history’s most notorious figures carries unique burdens for any actor. For German performer Martin Müller, taking on the role of Heinrich Himmler — the Reichsführer-SS and chief implementer of the Nazis’ “Final Solution” — meant confronting both the historical horror and the personal psychological weight of humanizing pure evil. Müller does so in writer-director Felix Randau’s drama I Is Another (Ich Ist ein Anderer), which receives its world premiere on Friday, August 7, 2026, in the Piazza Grande program of the 79th Locarno Film Festival.
The film stars Danish actor Claes Bang as Felix Kersten, Himmler’s longtime personal masseur, and Austrian actress Valerie Pachner as investigative journalist Hedda. Set mainly in 1952, the story follows Kersten and his wife as they travel by train toward Oslo, where he hopes recognition — possibly even a Nobel Peace Prize — awaits him for his claimed wartime efforts. Hedda ambushes him, determined to test the truth of his carefully constructed narrative. Kersten maintained that he used his privileged access to Himmler to save thousands of concentration camp prisoners. The journalist suspects self-mythologizing and opportunism. Their confrontation becomes a tense psychological duel about memory, self-justification, and the stories people tell to live with themselves.
Kersten was a skilled therapist who relieved Himmler’s chronic and agonizing intestinal spasms. The SS leader reportedly called him a “magic Buddha who cures everything” and granted him unusual latitude as a result. After the war, Kersten published memoirs and cultivated an image as a quiet rescuer who leveraged that influence for good. Historical scrutiny has complicated the picture. He was a member of the SS, and some documents suggest he inflated his achievements while downplaying his proximity to the regime. Director Randau, after extensive research, concluded that Kersten likely saved some lives — perhaps dozens rather than the thousands he claimed — but often for self-preserving reasons rather than pure altruism. “He was a narcissist. He was an opportunist… But I think he also was a hero somehow because he saved some lives,” Randau has said. “Not thousands, as he said, but he saved some lives. And I think he saved lives not for good reasons. He wanted to save his own ass.”
The film deliberately filters Himmler through Kersten’s perspective. Scenes between the two men draw from Kersten’s own accounts, which Randau treats as “his truth” even while acknowledging their unreliability. This approach allowed the production to avoid graphic depictions of camps or mass killings while still examining the banality and cold calculation at the heart of the Nazi apparatus.
Casting Himmler proved the most difficult hurdle. “The only part that was really hard to cast was Himmler,” Randau told The Hollywood Reporter. “I was looking for someone who could play a weasel kind of guy, but it was really, really tough.” Several actors declined. They accused the director of providing a stage for an evil figure. Randau rejected that reasoning outright. “I think that is really ridiculous and a big mistake because evil is a part of creation. If you ignore or neglect it, it will grow in the dark, and that’s what’s happening here in Germany, as we can all see.” He pointed to the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party as evidence that burying historical darkness only allows it to re-emerge.
After a wide search, casting director Suse Marquardt and Randau settled on Müller, an actor primarily known for stage and television work. The connection came through an e-casting. Müller recorded an audition with his coach and sent it in. Marquardt arranged a meeting. Randau traveled to Munich rather than requiring Müller to come to Berlin. They spoke for two hours in a restaurant. When Müller asked how many other candidates the director planned to see, Randau replied that he was already satisfied. “I just wanted to meet you,” he said.
Accepting the part forced Müller to confront the moral and emotional implications of the role. “It’s horrible to take on that role on the one hand, but on the other hand, it’s an interesting person,” he explained. “He is a horrible person, but people who are a horror are always interesting for an actor.” Importantly, the script kept Himmler away from the camps. “The film doesn’t show the real horror of Heinrich Himmler because it’s told via Felix Kersten. And he doesn’t tell us about all the horrors because he doesn’t want to be seen in a bad light.”
Even limited exposure proved intense. One extended night shoot required Müller and Bang to negotiate how many Jewish lives might be spared through Kersten’s intervention. “We filmed this scene the whole night, and at the end, we said to each other that it was so disgusting to talk about numbers, like people were nothing,” Müller recalled. “Himmler had no empathy and was really cold. In his mind, he was just organizing things. People talk about Heinrich Himmler as someone who saw himself as a mathematician of the Holocaust. For him, there were no human beings behind the numbers.”
Physical preparation was comparatively straightforward but still demanding. Randau asked Müller to appear fuller in the face. The actor reduced exercise and increased his food intake, gaining four or five kilograms. Shedding that weight after filming proved difficult. Leaving the character behind proved harder still. “It was really difficult to leave the character,” Müller said. “It was one thing to leave the four or five kilos that I had gained for the role behind… But the other thing was leaving this ugly character. These things just really stick with me. I just kept thinking, ‘what are politicians doing nowadays? Oh my God!’ For me, it’s a horror what the politicians are doing at the moment.”
Müller deliberately avoided studying previous screen portrayals of Himmler. Actors including Stephen Graham, Eddie Marsan, Matthias Freihof, Ulrich Noethen, and Ian Holm have played the role in various films and series. Müller chose a different path. “I think he was a totally uninteresting person,” he observed. Private material about Himmler is scarce compared with Hitler, Goebbels, or Göring. There are speeches, but few insights into his ordinary manner of speaking. “So I just didn’t care about that but tried to do it my way. And keep in mind: It’s not the ‘true’ Heinrich Himmler in the film. It’s Heinrich Himmler as [told] by Kersten. And you don’t know what is true or wrong. That’s what the whole film is actually about.”
That uncertainty sits at the core of I Is Another. Randau has described the project as exploring the flexibility of truth in an era when fundamental agreements about facts seem to be eroding. “Of course, it’s a period movie, but it has a lot to do with our present time… It’s about truth and the question: what is truth? Nowadays, there are no more fundamental agreements about anything, so truth has become quite a flexible thing. And that’s very dangerous.” The fictional train confrontation serves as a device to interrogate Kersten’s self-image while reflecting broader contemporary anxieties about narrative control, public reputation, and historical memory.
By refusing to reduce Himmler to a cartoonish monster, the film risks discomfort. Randau insisted that Himmler was “sadistic and completely nuts” yet still a human being. Canceling or ignoring such figures, he argues, solves nothing. Müller’s performance embodies that tension: an actor willingly inhabiting a man responsible for industrial-scale murder, aware of the moral cost, and left unsettled by the experience long after the cameras stopped rolling.
I Is Another arrives at Locarno as both a historical drama and a meditation on how individuals and societies construct — and sometimes fabricate — the stories that allow them to live with the past. Müller’s account of playing Himmler underscores the lasting residue such roles can leave. The discomfort is intentional. Confronting evil, the film and its creators suggest, remains necessary precisely because looking away has never made it disappear.
About The Author
