Holly Mae Brood Carries the Brood Name. Videoland Is Now Betting on the Actress

Holly Mae Brood

Photo: &C YouTube channel / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 25, 1994 Amsterdam, Netherlands
Occupation	Actress and television presenter
Known for	The Takeover, Hart Beat, Vicious

The surname got there before any of the work did. In the Netherlands, Brood still means Herman Brood, the rock singer and painter whose voice and canvases outlived him in Amsterdam, and Holly Mae Brood has spent her whole public life answering to it. She has built that life on two tracks at once: prime-time entertainment television, where hers is one of the most familiar faces in the country, and screen acting, where she has spent a decade trying to be more than a celebrity with a famous name. This year Videoland gave her the clearest answer yet, a series built around her.

Herman Brood was not her biological father, and she has never hidden it. Her mother, Xandra Jansen, was married to Herman when Holly was born in Amsterdam. Her biological father was the hairdresser and make-up artist Leo Spindelaar, with whom her mother had a long relationship that Herman knew about. Holly was given the Brood surname at birth and considers Herman her father. Her mother told her the full story when she was nine; she has said she was furious at first, and that Spindelaar, who died when she was a teenager, was a constant and beloved presence without being a father to her. Herman died when she was six. At his funeral in Paradiso, she sang a children’s pop hit from the stage because, as she later recalled, a stage that big seemed to ask for something.

The stage came early for a girl born on 25 November 1994. She danced from the age of six, worked as a dancer for the Junior Songfestival and for the children’s choir Kinderen voor Kinderen, and was picked from the ranks to sing solo there in 2006. A part in the musical Ciske de Rat followed, then dance training at the Lucia Marthas academy. In 2011 she released a reworked duet version of Herman Brood’s “When I Get Home”, her voice set against his. In 2014 she entered the seventh season of Holland’s Next Top Model and finished joint seventh.

Acting arrived almost by accident. Her first job was the slasher comedy SneekWeek, released in 2016, where she played opposite Marly van der Velden. The casting directors of Goede tijden, slechte tijden, the country’s longest-running soap, saw the film and wanted her as the sister of van der Velden’s character. As Amy Kortenaer she joined the soap in 2016 and, within roughly six months, was leading its spin-off Nieuwe Tijden, the first original series Videoland ever made, which ran for three seasons until 2018. At the audition for that show she met the actor Soy Kroon, her partner since 2016.

From there her career split in two. On one side came entertainment: she and Kroon won the dance show Dance Dance Dance in 2018, winning 100,000 euros for charity; from 2019 she co-presented the Dutch-Flemish Love Island with Viktor Verhulst; in 2021 she was one of the traitors in the first season of De Verraders. On the other side came the acting. Ivo van Hove cast her as Maemi in Lazarus, the David Bowie musical, at Amsterdam’s DeLaMar Theater in 2019 and 2020. She played Kelly Matulessy, assistant to Angela Schijf’s character, in the Videoland drama Meisje van Plezier, took the lead in the thriller Vals, and appeared in the ensemble comedy Alles is zoals het zou moeten zijn and its sequel.

The breakout on paper was The Takeover, a Dutch Netflix thriller directed by Annemarie van de Mond that premiered on 1 November 2022. Brood carried it as Mel Bandison, an ethical hacker who foils a data breach on a self-driving bus and is then framed for murder with a deepfake video. Netflix’s weekly figures logged about 25.9 million hours viewed in its first week. Dutch critics were far less kind; TV Gids called the film a botched job. That gap between audience and reviewers is the honest frame for much of her career so far. Her most-watched work has rarely been her most admired, and her presenting fame cuts both ways: it fills cinemas and streaming queues, and it also keeps her in the tabloids, where the Brood name, her relationship and old photo shoots get more space than her performances. She has said the surname adds pressure to perform; the larger obstacle may be the presenter’s chair, which makes it harder for an audience to forget who is playing the part.

The more recent roles have started to shift that balance. In February 2024 Videoland released PATTY, Will Koopman’s five-part drama about the singer and presenter Patty Brard, in which Brood played the young Patty of the girl-group years while Eva van de Wijdeven played her older self. That same year she had leading parts in three cinema releases, De Break-Up Club, Tegendraads and Schitterend, recording the title song of the last with the band I.O.S. In March 2025 she hosted the first season of the Videoland dating show I Kissed a Girl.

Then came a genre lead. In Amsterdamned II, Dick Maas’s sequel to his 1988 canal thriller, released in Dutch cinemas in December 2025, she plays Tara Lee, an ambitious young detective who brings Huub Stapel’s retired Eric Visser back to hunt a killer in the canals. She took motorbike lessons for the part and did a large share of her own stunts. Reviews were mixed, kinder to the action than to the script, but the film sold more than 100,000 tickets, earned a Golden Film and finished among the five most-visited Dutch films of 2025.

In April 2026 she joined the Videoland crime series Rippers, set around a gang war in Eindhoven, as Ava. In July, at a tribute in Amsterdam marking 25 years since Herman Brood’s death, she said what saddened her most was that he never saw her grow up and never met Kroon.

What she called a role that could really become hers is next. La Vida Barcelona, an eight-part romantic dramedy produced by Millstreet Films for Videoland, casts her as Juul (Julia in the English-language material), the daughter of a powerful Dutch design figure, sent undercover to sabotage a rival agency in Barcelona before the city, the job and two men pull her off course. The cast includes Priscilla Delgado, Greta Fernández, Martiño Rivas and Agustín Della Corte. The first season, shot in Barcelona and Amsterdam, is due on Videoland in 2027 and has already been sold to Germany. Before that, she plays Amira in De bovenburen, directed by Simone van Dusseldorp, scheduled for Dutch cinemas in early 2027. For the first time, the project with her name on it is being sold abroad on her performance rather than on her surname.

Featured Films

Hart Beat (2016) — The Takeover (2022) — as Mel Bandison

Tags: actors, actresses, Dutch cinema, The Takeover, Holly Mae Brood, Amsterdamned II

Related People

Featured Films

Related People

Discussion