Friederike Becht, the actress German TV trusts with women at the breaking point

Friederike Becht

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	October 14, 1986 Bad Bergzabern, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Labyrinth of Lies, Hannah Arendt, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele
Awards	Deutscher Fernsehpreis · Bochumer Theaterpreis · Ulrich-Wildgruber-Preis

For most of the six episodes of The Trap, Friederike Becht hardly leaves a house. Her character, the bestselling novelist Lisa Konrad, has not stepped outside in almost ten years, not since she found her sister murdered, and the Netflix series turns on the day she decides to lure the man she believes did it, a television journalist played by Hans Löw, into her living room with herself as the bait. It is the first lead role a worldwide audience has seen her in. German viewers already know the territory. Becht has become the actress their public broadcasters call when a script needs a woman standing at the exact point where she can no longer carry what has happened to her.

She describes the shoot with Löw in physical terms. “Over several weeks we fought a real duel,” she said in Netflix’s German press notes, “a fight my character had prepared for meticulously, mentally and physically.”

She grew up in Winden, a village in the Palatinate wine country near the French border, after being born in nearby Bad Bergzabern on 14 October 1986, one of twins. She trained at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2004 to 2008, and the stage found her before the cameras did. While still a student she played Thekla in Peter Stein’s marathon staging of Schiller’s Wallenstein at the Berliner Ensemble, a performance that earned her a nomination as best young actress in the critics’ poll of the magazine Theater heute in 2007.

Freelance work followed in Hamburg, Zürich and Freiburg, then a season in the ensemble of Schauspiel Essen, where she played Solveig in Peer Gynt. When the artistic director Anselm Weber moved to the Schauspielhaus Bochum in 2010, she went with him, and the Ruhr theatre became her base: Cecily in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Maria in Twelfth Night, the title figure’s daughter in Gorky’s Vassa Zheleznova, Maria in Lorca’s Yerma. Bochum gave her its theatre prize for young performers in 2014, and the Ulrich Wildgruber Prize followed in 2015.

Her film career began in the margins of productions that travelled. In Stephen Daldry’s The Reader she played Angela Berg, the sister of the boy at the centre of the story. Her first cinema lead came in Westwind, as Doreen, an East German rower who falls for a West German during a stay in Hungary; her own twin sister also auditioned, though the part of Doreen’s twin went to Luise Heyer. Margarethe von Trotta then cast her as the young philosopher in Hannah Arendt, the student half of a role Barbara Sukowa played as an adult. In Giulio Ricciarelli’s Labyrinth of Lies (Im Labyrinth des Schweigens), Germany’s submission for the foreign-language Oscar, she was Marlene Wondrak, the woman beside the young prosecutor who forces post-war Frankfurt to look at Auschwitz.

Television made her a lead, and it also gave her a specialism. She played the doll maker in the ARD biopic Käthe Kruse, the young Cosima in the family saga Der Wagner-Clan, and the profiler Nadja Simon in the ZDFneo series Perfume (Parfum), which Netflix carried abroad. Then the roles turned darker and more specific. In Plötzlich so still she was a young mother hiding her baby’s sudden death. In the ARD thriller series Faster Than Fear (Schneller als die Angst) she played a woman living with the aftermath of rape, the performance that won her the Deutscher Fernsehpreis for best actress in 2022. In the ZDF drama So laut du kannst she was a physiotherapist standing by a best friend who is drugged and raped in a luxury hotel.

That run deserves a harder look than the trophy suggests. German public television has a long habit of the issue film, the prime-time drama built around a subject before it is built around a person, and Becht has become one of its most dependable instruments. She speaks about these parts as advocacy. “We show a woman who defends herself and frees herself from powerlessness,” she told the TV guide prisma about So laut du kannst. The risk in that kind of work is that the theme decides the shape of the character before the actress gets to, and a decade of women in extremis can read, from outside, as one long role. Her strongest recent work cuts against it. In Mark Schlichter’s ZDF film Im Rausch she plays Katja, a magazine journalist and photographer who drinks herself into an affair with another alcoholic, again played by Hans Löw, and a joyn review noted that German prime time had rarely shown harder images of addiction. Becht’s own account of the preparation was about self-deception rather than message: talking to alcoholics, she said, made her see how much she lied to herself about smoking. Early English-language reviews of The Trap have been mixed, and their complaints land on the plotting, with one finding the grief-driven story compelling but too repetitive. The series rests on her.

The past year has been her busiest on screen. In Kirill Serebrennikov’s The Disappearance of Josef Mengele she plays Martha Mengele, the wife of the fugitive Nazi doctor played by August Diehl. In Hundertdreizehn, the ARD and ORF series that follows the people touched by a single bus crash, she plays Clara Eweleit; the series went on to win at the Deutscher Fernsehpreis. Before that came Geranien, premiered at the Berlinale in 2023, and Chiara Fleischhacker’s Vena. On stage she now appears as a guest in Bochum and at the Theater Duisburg, has toured a solo evening called Vor aller Augen, and records audiobooks for Penguin Random House.

She has stayed in Bochum rather than moving to Berlin like so many of her colleagues. She is married to the comedian and slam poet Sebastian Rabsahl, who performs as Sebastian 23, and they have two children. Asked by prisma why she lives there, she remembered her first walk from the station to the Schauspielhaus and added that many people claim Bochum has the most beautiful theatre in Germany. “They might be right.”

The Trap, adapted from Melanie Raabe‘s debut thriller and written and directed by Isabel Kleefeld of the team behind Liebes Kind, has been streaming worldwide on Netflix since 13 October 2026, with Matthias Brandt, Anna Schudt and Ursula Strauss in the cast. No new screen project of hers has been announced since. What Lisa Konrad gives her is an audience that has never seen her in a German issue drama, and a character who spends ten years inside before going after the truth herself.