Three actors and a writer: Götz Schubert’s family unites many great talents. How do you deal with so much creativity? For the star the four met to talk.
Victor and Lotte, do you know the story of how your parents met?
Victor Witte: Sure, that was at drama school – and Götz probably smelled a bit like sulfur.
Götz Schubert: But not because I was rehearsing Mephistopheles, but because of a medical skin cream.
Lotte Schubert: And after a party you went home together on the tram and supposedly said your goodbyes quite innocently.
Simone Witte: Let’s just leave it like that for now…
Victor, you are the writer in the acting clan. If you had to summarize your family’s story as a plot, what would it be?
Victor: I’m afraid we wouldn’t be suitable for novels or series; that would require more conflict, drama or tragedy. Fortunately, those don’t exist. This family is only suitable for a sitcom.
As an actor, you, Götz Schubert, are often involved in disastrous family relationships. What is it like for the others to see their father as a tyrant?
Götz: Fiction thrives on condensation, which is why I find it a stroke of luck that most of it isn’t private.
Lotte: You learn to abstract when you come from an acting family. And yet to this day I still feel a different empathy for characters played by a family member. Especially as a child, it was hard for me to bear it when Götz died on stage for hours. Then I saw my dad in particular.
Victor: I still remember the first time I consciously noticed you, Götz, as an actor. That was at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. I must have been four or five and Simone sneaked into the back of the auditorium with me during the performance. But I didn’t last long there because the situation overwhelmed me. I just thought, Wow, my dad is standing there on stage and all these people have come to watch him. It wasn’t admiration, but a childlike awe that left a deep impression. It took me a long time to free myself from this paternal template, and sometimes I still judge myself by it today.
In the ARD multi-part series “House of Glass”, in which Götz plays an egocentric father, one of the children says to the other: “Just because we have the same parents doesn’t mean that we had the same childhood.” Do you recognize yourself in this sentence?
Lotte: I was born seven years after Victor, so that alone probably applies to us.
Simone: A new child always means some kind of competition.