Cosima Henman, the director’s daughter now deciding who gets seen

Cosima Henman

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	December 21, 1996 Cologne, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Known for	The Magic Flute, Hard Feelings, Class Reunion 1.0

In NOAM, a ten-minute short set on a Berlin housing estate, Cosima Henman plays Mala, a seventeen-year-old with a small son, a family that has stopped turning up and an ex who drifts in drunk with his latest girlfriend on his arm. Henman wrote the film, directed it and co-produced it, and the part she kept for herself is a young woman nobody on screen bothers to look at. That is a pointed choice for an actress whose name has always come with another one attached. She is the daughter of the director Granz Henman, and for a good stretch of her career the person calling action on set was her father.

She was born in Cologne and grew up in a patchwork family, an experience she has described as a positive one that brought new siblings into her life. Her agency lists German and English as her mother tongues and Berlin as her home, with the city’s dialect as her native one. Her father had made his directing debut on Der Eisbär, the gangster comedy he co-directed with Til Schweiger, and his sets were where she started.

Her first role came in Die Teufelskicker, his adaptation of Frauke Nahrgang’s children’s football novel, which reached cinemas in March 2010, three months after her thirteenth birthday. She also appeared in a music video by Apollo 3, the band that took part in the film. Television followed quickly. She played the pupil Dunja Baum in several seasons of RTL’s school comedy Der Lehrer, turned up as Lisa in ZDFneo’s comedy series Blockbustaz and took a part in the Berlin Tatort episode “Wir – Ihr – Sie”. Between those jobs came more of her father’s projects for Sat.1, among them Nachbarn süß-sauer, Volltreffer and Abi ’97 – gefühlt wie damals, and a supporting turn in Til Schweiger’s Klassentreffen 1.0.

The first adult role with real weight came from somewhere else. In Isabel Kleefeld’s SWR drama Sugarlove she played Claire, the young woman a long-married couple, Barbara Auer and Fritz Karl, find online to supply what their marriage no longer has. The arrangement is meant to stay physical and contained; Claire is the character who works out that she is being used as a tool and refuses to stay one. A year later she was in The Magic Flute, Florian Sigl’s English-language fantasy set in a Mozart boarding school in the Austrian Alps, sharing the screen with F. Murray Abraham and Jack Wolfe in a production that counted Roland Emmerich’s Centropolis among its companies.

Then came the credit most people outside Germany have seen. In Hard Feelings, released by Netflix under the German title Hammerharte Jungs, she played Paula, a teenager who fears that sex will wreck her friendship with Charly while their suddenly talkative genitals push them toward it. Her father directed it. It was the sixth project of his to feature her, and it was received coldly: Outlook India called it a humourless sex comedy, granting only that Henman’s Paula had an arc and that she played it slightly more convincingly than her co-lead, and MCM’s own review found a clever premise spent on crude, repetitive gags. Here the nepotism question is fair, and it cuts in an unexpected direction. The film that carried her name furthest is the one that argues least for her, while the case for her as an actress has been built almost entirely in projects her father had nothing to do with.

The clearest of them is RTL’s Behringer und die Toten – Ein Bamberg-Krimi, created and written by Berit Walch, in which she plays Ela Jenning, the young detective at the side of Antoine Monot’s grumbling Konrad Behringer. The films have done well for the channel: the case “Antoniusfeuer” drew 2.9 million viewers and won its prime-time slot among 14- to 59-year-olds with an 11.0 percent share. In “Romeo” the series sent Ela undercover as an untrained German and English teacher at an elite private school, where her working-class edge grates against the pupils’ privilege. Reviewing a later case in the Stuttgarter Zeitung, the critic Tilmann P. Gangloff noted that the chases go to the wiry Ela while her boss does the head work, and added that, to make up for it, she is clearly the funnier of the two.

Alongside the Bamberg films came Natalie in the Prime Video series Beasts Like Us, where humans live side by side with vampires and zombies under a charter of creature rights, and the title voice in Tafiti: Across the Desert, Nina Wels’s animated film about a young meerkat, which won the Cinekindl audience award at Filmfest München in 2025.

In the summer of 2026 she landed a prime-time comedy lead. In ZDF’s Plötzlich Schwester, directed by Tine Rogoll from a script by Svenja Ingwersen, she plays Sandy Koslowski, the loud, warm half-sister whose appearance at a funeral reveals that the dead father of Klara Lange’s buttoned-up Sandra had kept a second family for more than thirty years. Andrea Sawatzki and Anita Vulesica play the two feuding mothers. The film went online on 13 July 2026 and aired on 6 August, and the TV magazine prisma singled her out as the most convincing performer in it. Promoting it, she drew on her own upbringing: “Basically, you should meet these family models with openness and give them a chance.”

NOAM, meanwhile, had its premiere on 16 November 2025 at FILMZ, the festival of German cinema in Mainz, where it was nominated for best short film. The Braunschweig International Film Festival also screened it, presenting it as her debut as a director. Jeanne Goursaud, Paul Wollin and Konstantin Gries play opposite her.

ZDF commissioned a sequel before the first film had even aired. Plötzlich Mutter, directed by Felix Stienz, has been shooting in Cologne since mid-June 2026, and it hands Sandy the story: she becomes pregnant without planning to and offers the baby to Sandra and her husband. Her agency also lists two further Bamberg cases for 2026, “Goldjunge” and “Hexenwahn”. The open question is the one NOAM asked first: what Henman does with a camera when she is the one deciding who gets seen.

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