“Tatort” from Ludwigshafen: Bernadette Heerwagen shines as the revenge mother

Crime thriller from Ludwigshafen
Moving until the last second: Bernadette Heerwagen was the revenge mother in “Tatort”

Emotional “crime scene” from Ludwigshafen: A young girl commits suicide after being abused by a pedophile. Her stepmother does everything she can to hunt down the perpetrator herself. Actress Bernadette Heerwagen shines in the leading role.

Suddenly a shot is fired. A deafening bang that gives Inspectors Lena Odenthal (Ulrike Folkerts) and Johanna Stern (Lisa Bitter) pause. The investigators arrive too late. They cannot prevent the desperate mother Julia da Borg from taking her own life.

Actress Bernadette Heerwagen plays this woman marked by pain and guilt who, after the death of her stepdaughter, whom she loved like her own child, only has one goal: revenge. She wants to catch the man who contacted the 13-year-old on the Internet and posed as a boy of the same age. At a meeting he abused the child. The trauma drove the girl to suicide. When Borg actually comes face to face with the perpetrator, she shoots herself – not him.

“Tatort” from Ludwigshafen dealt with cyber grooming

It is the end of a moving “crime scene” from Ludwigshafen, which dealt urgently with topics such as cyber grooming, identity theft and manipulation on the Internet. Leading actress Bernadette Heerwagen particularly shone in the role of Julia da Borg.

For the 46-year-old, filming “Tatort” was a journey into her own past. Because she worked again with director Miguel Alexandre and screenwriter Harald Göckeritz. Both are also responsible for the film “Nana”, with which Heerwagen began her career as a 17-year-old.

Heerwagen is the daughter of a former GSG 9 soldier and a journalist. She was born in Bonn in 1977, but soon moved to Bavaria with her family. Her younger brother played with Mats Hummels at FC Bayern Munich in his youth. Philipp Heerwagen later played in goal for VfL Bochum and FC St. Pauli, among others.

Bernadette Heerwagen plays in the ZDF series “Munich Murder”

Bernadette Heerwagen was drawn to film as a schoolgirl. Among other things, she applied for the “Filming Classroom” workshop at the Bavaria Film Studios. After her debut in 1995, numerous other engagements and awards followed. In 2000, she received the Bavarian Television Prize and the Austrian Romy Film Prize for her performance in the TV series “Der Schandfleck”. There was an Adolf Grimme Prize each for the drama “Greetings from Kashmir” and the film “To the Border”. Heerwagen has been appearing in the ZDF series “München Mord” for ten years. There she can also live out her comedic talent.

When the series started in 2014, she told the “Bild” newspaper: “At the very beginning I was told that I should look for a second source of income because I would be unemployed by the time I was 30 anyway. Then I thought about it for a long time. But at some point I stopped looking for what this second mainstay could be.”

Bernadette Heerwagen can leave it at that. She is in demand as an actress and in her private life she shouldn’t complain about the lack of work: a few years ago she moved to the Allgäu with her husband, actor Ole Puppe, and their two daughters. The family lives there on a self-sufficient farm. Heerwagen learned to grow fruit and vegetables, manage fields and look after animals. There’s just one thing she hasn’t found yet: an effective method to prevent the fox from stealing her chickens.

Sources: “Bild” newspaper, Meal & grain, Ringlstetter