Lea Drinda, the actress German drama keeps casting as the girl who disappears

Lea Drinda

Photo: UlrikeZimmermann / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	2001 Jena, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Sound of Falling
Awards	New Faces Award, Best Young Actress · Hessischer Fernsehpreis, best acting performance · Cinema Jove, Best Performance in a Series

There is a pattern in Lea Drinda’s roles, and once you notice it, it is hard to unsee. She has played a girl pulled into the heroin scene around a Berlin railway station, a teenager whose parents bug half a suburb trying to find her, a farm girl who walks into a river as a war ends, and a resident of a group home who has decided not to live past her eighteenth birthday. German screen drama has learned to hand her the girl who goes missing, in body or in spirit, and she has learned to make that absence the most present thing in the frame. Her next role asks something new: what does she do with a real woman who stayed?

Drinda grew up in Jena, the Thuringian university city where both her parents worked as doctors at the university hospital. Acting ran further back in the family. Her grandfather was Horst Drinda, a long-serving member of the Deutsches Theater ensemble in East Berlin and a familiar face of East German film and television. She holds German and Spanish citizenship, and Valencian is her second native language. Her own plan was not the stage at all: she meant to study philosophy, psychology and sociology.

The camera got there first. Born in Jena in 2001, she made her debut in 2017 in Die letzten Kinder im Paradies, a short film made at the Munich film school HFF, followed by small parts in the long-running series Die Pfefferkörner and Letzte Spur Berlin. Then came the casting for Philipp Kadelbach’s series version of We Children from Bahnhof Zoo, the book that made Christiane F. a byword for West Berlin’s teenage heroin scene in the 1970s. When filming began in 2019 she was 17, the youngest of the principal cast, and she sat her final school exams while shooting. By the end of it she had decided to make a living from acting.

The series arrived on Amazon Prime Video in February 2021, with Drinda as Babsi, the lost daughter of a comfortable family. Reviewers singled her out. Writers at Der Spiegel and Die Zeit both reached for the same comparison, the young Jean Seberg, and Andreas Bernard wrote in Die Zeit that she played Babsi with breathtaking intensity. The role earned her a nomination for the German Acting Award as best newcomer.

Her first lead followed in 2022 with Becoming Charlie, a ZDFneo miniseries of six short episodes about a young person who identifies as neither man nor woman. It is the part that has brought her the most prizes. The Hessian Television Prize jury credited her with taking the heaviness out of a coming-out story by giving the character self-distance and irony; that year she also won the New Faces Award for best young actress, and the performance drew nominations for the German Television Award and the Grimme Prize. In 2023 Cinema Jove, the festival in Valencia, gave her its award for best performance in a series. Supporting work in the Amazon fantasy series The Gryphon and the drama Wer wir sind filled the gap.

Then Apple called. Where’s Wanda?, which premiered in October 2024 as Apple TV+‘s first German-language original, gave her the title role in a show built around her disappearance. Heike Makatsch and Axel Stein play Carlotta and Dedo Klatt, parents who give up on the police and start bugging their neighbours to find their 17-year-old daughter. Drinda’s Wanda is the question every episode asks, which makes her the lead of a series in which she is mostly offstage.

Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling raised the stakes. The film follows four girls across a century on the same farm in the Altmark, and Drinda plays Erika, the 1940s strand: a girl fixated on her bedridden uncle, an amputee, who binds her own leg to fake the same injury and, as the war ends, disappears into the river with other women. The film won the Jury Prize in competition at Cannes in 2025, was Germany’s Oscar entry and reached the December shortlist without securing a nomination, then swept the German Film Awards, winning all ten categories it was nominated in.

That run is impressive, and it carries a risk that is easy to miss inside the praise. The Seberg comparison flatters, but Seberg is remembered as much for how others framed her as for what she chose. Drinda’s most decorated lead remains a short-form series on a niche channel, while her place in the biggest film she has made is one strand of an ensemble mosaic whose honours went to the film and its director. Danke für nichts, Stella Marie Markert’s debut released in October 2025, drew mixed reviews, with Perlentaucher finding that it pressed its themes too insistently, and it cast her once more as a girl with an end date: Katharina, who means to die before she turns 18. The roles are good. The repetition is the part worth watching.

This autumn has started to loosen the pattern. On 16 September 2026, Disney+ released City of Blood, an eight-part vampire dystopia adapted from the graphic novel Berlinoir, in which she plays Bea Hoffmann opposite Soma Pysall as her long-lost sister. The director is Philipp Kadelbach, five years after We Children from Bahnhof Zoo. A day later Kalter Hund, Pauline Roenneberg’s debut feature, opened in German cinemas with Drinda as Fanny, granddaughter of Corinna Harfouch’s matriarch, in a dark comedy about a family hiding a death at a hundredth birthday party. And on 21 October 2026 the second season of Where’s Wanda? began on Apple TV, with new episodes weekly through 9 December. The search is over: Wanda has been found standing beside a dead body, and her parents’ new investigation is meant to clear her.

The part that may matter most is still being finished. In June 2026 Drinda was cast as the photographer Astrid Kirchherr in Hamburg Days, a six-part ZDF and BBC drama about the Beatles’ Hamburg years, inspired by Klaus Voormann’s autobiography with Christian Schwochow as showrunner. She took over the role from Luna Jordan, who died suddenly in May while the series was filming, a hard inheritance for any actor. The shoot was scheduled to move from Hamburg to Munich and Liverpool and wrap by the end of August; the BBC will show it on BBC One and iPlayer; no broadcast date has been announced. Kirchherr is known for her early photographs of the Beatles. After years of girls who vanish from the frame, Drinda’s next character is the woman behind the camera.