Pheline Roggan
The sword-wielding Valkyrie from the Nibelungen “crime scene”
“Tatort: Gold”: Actress Pheline Roggan (left) in a martial showdown with colleague Ulrike C. Tscharre
© SWR/Benoît Linder
Actress Pheline Roggan not only likes to swing her sword in the new “crime scene”, but also in real life – for the environment.
Actress Pheline Roggan (42) had a lot to do in the new Ludwigshafen “crime scene”: While her colleagues were mostly allowed to shine in static dialogue scenes at wineries or in Nibelungen museums, she had to play Melania Wolter, the crazy ex-wife, in her role Bankers with a penchant for jousting, delivering full drama in every scene.
With drastic realism, she first illustrates the neglected misery of Melania, who has fallen victim to alcoholism, who then, sword in hand, embarks on a Wagnerian revenge campaign against her ex and his supposed lover. At the big showdown in the “Pfälzer Hof” hotel in Deidesheim, she once again demonstrated all her dramatic talent by smashing the furniture.
At the latest after this furious appearance, you should have Pheline Roggan on your screen – after all, she is one of the most interesting faces in the German film business.
Breakthrough with Fatih Akin’s “Soul Kitchen”
After a five-year modeling career, she started acting in 2001 at the age of twenty and soon celebrated her breakthrough with roles in films such as “Kebab Connection”, Fatih Akins (50), “Soul Kitchen” or “Russendisco”. She can also be seen again and again on theater stages, most recently in 2018 at the Nibelungen Festival in Worms in Feridun Zaimoglu’s (58) play “Siegfrieds Erben”. The casting of her role in the “Nibelungen-“Tatort” is likely to have been significantly inspired by her appearance there as a mystical shaman.
Soft spot for cinematic experiments
In addition to a preference for striking and sometimes bitchy characters, the Hamburg native is characterized by a passion for cinematic experiments that largely do without a script and demand a high degree of improvisational talent from the actors. She presented this talent particularly impressively between 2017 and 2023 in a total of five seasons of the extremely successful improv format “jerks.” alongside Christian Ulmen (47) and Fahri Yardım (43). Incidentally, the busy actress is by no means a part of “Tatort” for the first time: she was already seen in “Tatort: Vergissmeinnicht” and “Tatort: Im Abseits” in 2010 and 2011.
Commitment to sustainable film production
Even without a sword in hand, Pheline Roggan is dedicated to making the world a little better with her work. In 2020, she set up the “Changemakers.film” initiative caused a stir, with which she wants to encourage German film productions to work more sustainably and environmentally consciously. Together with fellow actors Miriam Stein (35) and Moritz Vierboom (40) and director Laura Fischer (37), she formulated a 13-point explanation with the principles of “green shooting”. With great success: In the meantime, more than 600 protagonists of the German film industry have agreed to the ecological production standards contained in a voluntary commitment.
Philine Roggan is currently in the ARD documentary series “We can do it differently” to see in which she, together with Anke Engelke (57), Bjarne Mädel (55), Axel Prahl (63) and other acting celebrities, is looking for a “constructive way of dealing with the climate crisis”.