Age: 68
male
Christian Berkel (born October 28, 1957) is a German actor. Berkel was born in Berlin, Germany. His father was a military doctor. From the age of 14 he lived in Paris where he took drama lessons with Jean-Louis Barrault and Pierre Berlin. He then trained at the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin and appeared on stage in Augsburg, Düsseldorf, Munich, Vienna and at the Schiller Theatre, Berlin. He has appeared in many German television productions and secured a major role in the Academy Award-nominated film Downfall as Doctor Ernst-Günther Schenck. He has followed this with significant roles in the Paul Verhoeven directed Dutch movie Black Book and the big budget United States movies Flightplan, Valkyrie (in which he portrayed Colonel Albrecht Mertz von Quirnheim) and the Academy Award-nominated Inglourious Basterds. He lives in Berlin with the actress Andrea Sawatzki, with whom he has two sons. He is also fluent in French and English. Description above from the Wikipedia article Christian Berkel, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Christian Berkel
Orastes
for Orastes in Conan: The Hyborian Age (TV-Series)
Suggested by rickzeo
The kingdoms of the Hyborian Age have reached a decadent pinnacle. In the great nations of the West , a new "Doctrine of Serenity" has taken hold. Led by a class of refined scholars and "benevolent" viziers, society has come to view the primal impulses of man—his capacity for protective violence, his rugged independence, and his competitive fire—as "atavistic tremors" that threaten the social harmony. Strength is treated as a defect; passion is treated as a sickness. Amidst this quiet, perfumed stagnation arrives Conan of Cimmeria. To the "enlightened" nobility, he is a walking blasphemy—a man who smells of sweat and leather in a world of silk and incense. He does not speak in riddles, he does not perform for the court, and he reacts to injustice with a heavy hand. He is the "Inconvenient Man," an unrefined mirror reflecting the cowardice of a society that has traded its agency for comfort. But the "Doctrine of Serenity" is not a human evolution; it is a siege strategy. The viziers are the Serpent Men of Valusia, ancient reptilian infiltrators who have traded their swords for the "Illusion of the Serpent." They understand that a man who has lost his "will to strive" is a man who cannot defend his home. By systematically shaming the warrior spirit and pathologizing the individual, the Serpent Men are "taming" humanity into a docile herd, stripping away their natural defenses before the final strike. The tragedy lies in the people themselves. Conditioned to fear their own shadows, the citizens actively hunt the "barbarians" among them, believing that by extinguishing the last embers of human fire, they will finally be safe. Only when the Serpent Men shed their human masks do the deluded realize their error. In a world of "harmonious" slaves, the unrefined Cimmerian alone remains capable of holding a blade, proving that the savage virtues society tried to "cure" were the only things keeping the darkness at bay.
