Géza Weisz, the actor the Dutch drama schools passed over and Dutch television cannot get enough of

Géza Weisz

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	December 26, 1986 Amsterdam, Netherlands
Occupation	Actor
Known for	The Takeover, Hart Beat, The East

There is a particular kind of absurdity in winning a lying competition when your entire career has been spent proving something true. Géza Weisz won RTL 4’s De Verraders in 2026 — a game of psychological manipulation in which he played the role of traitor across twelve episodes and walked off set with a prize, telling the press afterward that his strategy was “lying until you believe it yourself.” What nobody mentioned was that Weisz had been rehearsing that sentence his entire adult life, just not in the way you’d expect.

His father is Frans Weisz, one of the figures that defined Dutch film across the second half of the twentieth century — a director whose credits run from experimental shorts to the crime thriller Lily Was Here. Growing up in Amsterdam’s cultural circles, the son carried two unavoidable disadvantages alongside every advantage his family offered: the name raised expectations that any honest audition would struggle to meet, and the drama schools he tried for decided, at the outset, that he wasn’t ready. Neither Toneelschool Amsterdam nor Toneelacademie Maastricht accepted him on his first application. He was born in the city on December 26, 1986, to a father who had survived the Second World War as a child by hiding, and a grandfather who had not survived it at all — murdered at Auschwitz.

What followed the rejections is the part of Géza Weisz’s biography that the acting profession usually prefers to omit. He went to work at Kemna Casting, one of the Netherlands’ most active agencies, and spent years inside an industry he still couldn’t officially join. He watched how parts were assigned, how decisions were made, how the machinery of Dutch film and television actually worked from the inside. By the time Toneelschool Amsterdam eventually admitted him — the same school that had turned him away — he had already learned more than it could teach him. He graduated in 2012.

The debut had come nine years earlier. Boy Ecury (2003), a film about a young Antillean resistance fighter during the Second World War, gave Weisz his first screen credit as a teenager. By 2007, he had a lead in Timboektoe, cast as Romeo — a choice that required either real dramatic stretch or a very good sense of irony, possibly both. The rom-com register suited him, but so did something harder. The controversial Alleen maar nette mensen (2012) — directed by Lodewijk Crijns, based on a novel by Robert Vuijsje — placed him as David Samuels, a young Jewish man from Amsterdam-Zuid whose life is upended by desire and social friction. The film collected a Gouden Film award (over 100,000 admissions) while simultaneously generating some of the fiercest cultural debate Dutch cinema had seen in years, with critics accusing it of deploying racial stereotypes for laughs. Weisz’s performance held steady across the controversy.

The television years were productive in the way Dutch television demands: regular, popular, technically consistent. Bluf (2014–2015), twenty episodes as Tjé Huyt, established him as someone who could carry a series without leaning on cinema lineage. Wiplala (2014), a family fantasy in which he played the title character — a small magical creature who accidentally shrinks a family — connected with younger audiences in a way that suggested his range extended well beyond what any single genre could use. By the time the Netflix era arrived in Dutch production, Weisz was already a fixture.

F*ck Love Too (2022, Netflix) gave him Jim, a role requiring exact comic timing rather than emotional subtlety. The Takeover (2022, Netflix), a thriller with international distribution ambitions, let him demonstrate he could handle something harder. But the most significant thing Weisz put on screen that year was neither of those. Voices of Liberation, a documentary series about Dutch families marked by the Second World War, included him reading his grandfather’s concentration-camp diary aloud for the first time on camera. The family’s Jewish history — his grandfather murdered at Auschwitz, his father surviving by hiding as a child — suddenly acquired the texture of a primary source.

That juxtaposition — the rom-com Jim and the man reading from a concentration-camp diary — is not a contradiction. It is Géza Weisz. In 2025 he appeared in Nordin (Prime Video), playing a gym teacher whose conspiracy theories escalate with comic precision across every episode, to enthusiastic notices. He also shot Love Fail Repeat, a romantic fantasy set on the island of Curaçao, released the same year. He is presently attached to Spinoza, currently in post-production, in the role of Zacuto.

Outside of screens, Amsterdam’s nights have long included Weisz behind a DJ booth — at Jimmy Woo, at AIR, at the Chicago Social Club. He began DJing at twelve, played his first professional set at Melkweg, and has not stopped since. He co-owns three restaurants in the city: Oeuf, Gertrude, and Trees. His partner since 2019 is the social media influencer Ella Amma. The man who wins lying competitions on Dutch primetime television also makes food and music for the same city that twice refused to teach him how to act.

Spinoza remains in post-production. Whatever comes next, the schools that turned him away will almost certainly be watching.

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Tags: actors, Bluf, Dutch actors, Dutch cinema, F*ck Love Too, Frans Weisz

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