Actor: Hassan Akkouch: “Please don’t say clan”

actor
Hassan Akkouch: “Please don’t say clan”

Actor Hassan Akkouch (“Contra”) found his profession via an unusual path.

There was once a documentary about his family – “Neukölln Unlimited” ran at the Berlinale in 2010 and also won a prize there, Akkouch told the “Berliner Zeitung”. “My mother then said: Why don’t you study acting! Then I googled it and saw that it really works.”

Then he did it. “My father wasn’t too enthusiastic about it at first,” said Akkouch. “But then the first roles came, my father still had a shisha café in Neukölln at the time, and all the acquaintances and relatives were sitting there, and in addition to playing cards, they saw me on television, which he thought was good.”

Akkouch has played in the series “4 Blocks” and “WaPo Berlin”. Now he is in the movie «JGA: Jasmin. gina Anna.” to see. In the interview, he was asked that he came from an “extended Arab family”. “Yes, but not as you know it in the German sense,” he said. “And please don’t say clan, because that always has such a negative connotation. My father just has twenty-two siblings, and that’s a lot even for Lebanon.”

He named the actors Christian Bale (“The Big Short”) and Tahar Rahim (“The Mauritanian”) as role models. Rahim had become extremely changeable after he was given the chance “to play other things than just the criminals”. So he proved himself as an actor? “Exactly, and of course that’s also my dream, to prove myself as an actor, to be seen as an actor and not just as someone who comes from a certain milieu or something.”

dpa