Axel Stein traded Tommie Krause’s bobble hat for a father’s wiretaps

Axel Stein

Photo: 9EkieraM1 / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 28, 1982 Wuppertal, Germany
Occupation	Actor and comedian
Known for	The Vault, Barefoot, The Crocodiles
Awards	Deutscher Comedypreis · Rising Movie Talent · Jupiter

Dedo Klatt is a suburban father who bugs his neighbours’ houses because the police investigation into his missing daughter has stalled. In Where’s Wanda?, Apple‘s first German-language original series, Axel Stein plays him almost without jokes: exhausted, frightened, funny only when the situation forces it. For a large part of the German audience that is a strange thing to watch. They met Stein as a teenager in a bobble hat, as the son of a petty, rule-obsessed Cologne caretaker, and two decades of popular comedies did little to move that picture. Stein knows it, and lately he has started saying so.

He comes from Wuppertal, and he was working before most children have a paper round. While still at school he took guest parts in television series, among them the police drama Die Wache, and turned up in German commercials for Digimon Virtual Pets, a Tamagotchi-style toy. He has never really left the region. “Basically, I’m an NRW kid,” he said in a summer interview distributed by the spot on news agency, meaning North Rhine-Westphalia, the industrial west where he still lives.

The door opened through Tom Gerhardt. Hausmeister Krause – Ordnung muss sein, Gerhardt’s Sat.1 sitcom about Dieter Krause, a caretaker who polices the tenants of a housing block in Cologne-Kalk like a one-man block warden, cast Stein, born on 28 February 1982 and still a teenager, as Tommie, the son Gerhardt had once played himself in his film Voll normaaal. Stein wore Tommie’s hat from 1999 to 2008. In parallel the cinema found him: Marc Rothemund’s teen comedy Harte Jungs gave him his first lead in a feature in 2000, the sequel Knallharte Jungs followed in 2002, and that year he won the Deutscher Comedypreis as best newcomer. He also got his own comedy series, Axel!, later reworked as Axel! will’s wissen.

The comedy years

What came next was a long, profitable run in German popular cinema. He played Kevin in the children’s gang film Vorstadtkrokodile and its sequels. He played Peter Vorndran, the father of the hero, in Hilfe, ich hab meine Lehrerin geschrumpft, a family fantasy that sold more than 1.1 million cinema tickets in Germany, and came back for both sequels. He lent his voice to German dubs, among them Chuck in the Angry Birds films and a penguin called Juri in the Die Schule der magischen Tiere sequels. On television he was a reliable guest of Stefan Raab’s event shows, and he finished on the podium of the TV total Stock Car Crash Challenge more often than any other driver. Cars are more than a gimmick for him: he has raced in the Mini Challenge and the Scirocco R-Cup, and since 2018 he has run the YouTube car channel Axel und Matthias with the presenter Matthias Malmedie.

Not every attempt to break the pattern held. After two appearances as Turbo in Alarm für Cobra 11, he took the lead in Turbo & Tacho, a feature-length spin-off meant as the pilot for its own series; audiences did not respond and the series was never made. He moved behind the camera for the horror film Tape_13, which screened at the Berlinale in 2014.

The harder question sits in Die Goldfische, Alireza Golafshan’s comedy about a paralysed banker who uses a flat-share of disabled residents to smuggle his untaxed money across the Swiss border. Stein played Rainer “Rainman” Schnellinger, one of two autistic housemates, opposite Tom Schilling and Jella Haase. His gift for broad timing was both the reason to cast him and the main risk. The Catholic film review Filmdienst judged that the film did not want to use its characters for cheap jokes but still allowed itself occasional slips; the magazine Cinema found that it slid into formula. Golafshan went on to win the Bavarian Film Award for best new director, presented to him by Stein and his co-star Luisa Wöllisch. Whether the performance moved the image of disability in German comedy, or just borrowed it, is the kind of argument his career has rarely invited and this film did.

A step away from Tommie

The turn became visible in smaller choices. In Jaume Balagueró’s Spanish heist film Way Down, set during a World Cup final in Madrid, he played Klaus alongside Freddie Highmore and Sam Riley. On Prime Video he joined the third German season of LOL: Last One Laughing, in which comedians try not to laugh at one another. Netflix cast him in the ensemble of Spieleabend, a game-night comedy released worldwide in July 2024. Then UFA Fiction and Apple put him opposite Heike Makatsch as Dedo and Carlotta Klatt in Where’s Wanda?, created by Oliver Lansley, which premiered in October 2024 with eight episodes and earned a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes.

His private life he keeps mostly private. From 2008 he lost 45 kilos over about five years. In August 2015 his brother, who was also his manager, died. Two years ago he finished building an energy-efficient house near a forest in North Rhine-Westphalia, and he no longer chases premieres. “I don’t want to sound arrogant, but I’m not really the red-carpet type any more,” he said this summer.

He was just as direct about the role that made him. Asked whether he would return as Tommie Krause if a revival came along, Stein said it would feel more like a step backwards. “When you make such a successful series with a bobble hat on your head and the whole of Germany knows you, you often get reduced to that role,” he said. “I wanted to make other big films and not always be pinned down to one project.”

The calendar suggests he means it. The second season of Where’s Wanda? began on Apple TV on 21 October 2026, with Wanda, played by Lea Drinda, found standing over a body and suspected of murder, and her parents investigating again; new episodes arrive weekly until the finale on 9 December. Since July 2026 he has been shooting the Spieleabend sequel for Netflix in and around Berlin, with Marco Petry directing again. He is part of the ensemble of Onkel Ruben und das Loch im Garten, a six-part ARD and WDR family series about a Ruhr household upended by a small-time criminal uncle, due in the ARD Mediathek at the end of the year, and he has said he is shooting a cinema film this autumn for release next year. None of those projects involves a bobble hat.

Featured Films

Tags: actors, German cinema, Axel Stein, Where's Wanda?, Heike Makatsch, Die Goldfische

Related People

Gustaf Skarsgård

Callum Turner

Dan Stevens

Friederike Becht

Christopher Mintz-Plasse

Paula Kalenberg