Lisa-Marie Koroll, the actress who never tried to shake off Bibi & Tina

Lisa-Marie Koroll

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

Born	December 26, 1997 Eisenach, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Paradise, Drive – The Pretenders, Haunted Hospital: Heilstatten
Awards	New Faces (shared)

Most actors who became famous as children spend their twenties trying to bury the part that made them. Lisa-Marie Koroll has taken the opposite route. She still talks with open gratitude about Tina Martin, the horse-mad stable girl she played beside Lina Larissa Strahl’s teenage witch in the Bibi & Tina films, and she has said in plain words that Tina is nothing she wants to shake off. Meanwhile the parts she chooses keep drifting somewhere a children’s matinee never went, from a teenager starving herself to a woman hunted across a North Sea island by her own double. The question her career is asking this autumn is whether the audience that met her on horseback will follow her into the dark.

She grew up in Eisenach, in Thuringia, as Lisa-Marie Werner. Her first long engagement was Familie Dr. Kleist, the ARD family series in which she played Clara from the second season until the show ended, a part that followed her from childhood into her twenties. Acting was a sideline to school until the cinema adaptations of the Bibi und Tina audio plays went looking for a Tina.

She won the part in the summer of 2013, and the first film, directed by Detlev Buck, opened in March 2014, when Koroll, born on 26 December 1997, was sixteen. Buck staged it as a bright pop musical, and the formula carried four films in three years: after Bibi & Tina came Bibi & Tina: Voll verhext!, Bibi & Tina: Mädchen gegen Jungs and Bibi & Tina: Tohuwabohu Total, the last of them released in February 2017. Koroll sang on the soundtracks, and in 2015 she and Strahl shared a special prize at the New Faces Awards. Between shoots she finished her Abitur at the Albert-Schweitzer-Gymnasium in Ruhla in 2016.

The exit was planned. Before the final film opened she told t-online that at some point you want to take a different path and realise new projects, and in early 2017 she moved to Berlin. That same year she published an advice book, Lass Konfetti für dich regnen: Sei glücklich, nicht perfekt!, whose subtitle, be happy, not perfect, now reads like a mission statement for a former teen idol. The first roles after Tina leaned on genre. In the horror film Heilstätten a group of YouTubers attempts a 24-hour challenge in an abandoned sanatorium; Misfit and Abikalypse were school comedies; and in Marc Rothemund’s Es ist zu deinem Besten she played one of the daughters whose fathers, Heiner Lauterbach and Jürgen Vogel among them, conspire against their boyfriends.

The work that changed how the industry saw her came from commercial television. In Wir sind jetzt, which premiered in 2019 on the streaming service now called RTL+ before airing on RTL II, she played Laura, a seventeen-year-old whose circle of friends is knocked off course by a death. In Aus Haut und Knochen, a Sat.1 drama, she was Lara, a sixteen-year-old in the grip of anorexia who refuses to believe she is ill. Together the two roles earned her a nomination for best actress at the 2021 Deutscher Fernsehpreis, and Wir sind jetzt was nominated as best drama series the same year.

That nomination also shows how narrow her lane has been. Nearly every significant part of her twenties has been tied to youth: teenage drama, teenage horror, school comedy and now a young-adult romance pitched at the audience of Maxton Hall. German television tends to anoint its leading actresses through public-broadcaster crime and period drama, and Koroll’s most serious work arrived instead through RTL II and Sat.1, channels that rarely set the terms of critical prestige. Her online reach complicates the picture. In 2020 she told t-online she had stepped away from Instagram, where she then had 427,000 followers, because she would rather use that reach for things with more relevance, such as the campaign to cut Germany’s tax on tampons. The same following is part of what makes her bankable for streamers selling to young viewers. Gratitude toward Tina is an honest position. It is also one the market rewards, and whether it has become a ceiling is the part of her story still unwritten.

Between those poles she has tested other registers. She played Melli Spitz in Ze Network, Christian Alvart’s spy comedy for RTL+ in which David Hasselhoff plays himself. In Boris Kunz’s Netflix thriller Paradise, released in July 2023, she was Marie Theissen, daughter of a biotech founder played by Iris Berben whose company trades years of human life; Kostja Ullmann’s desperate salesman kidnaps Marie believing she is her rejuvenated mother, and the film turns her into the price of someone else’s bargain. She also appeared in Ruth Olshan’s Brandenburg drama Wolfswinkel and took a supporting part as Vanessa in the ZDF vampire series Love Sucks in 2024.

This autumn she carries two leads at once. Die Düsteren, a six-part ZDFneo mystery created by Jan-Martin Scharf and Arne Nolting and directed by Lea Becker, casts her as Soma, an impulsive young woman who follows a clue about her unknown parents to a North Sea island where doubles of the islanders rise from the mudflats to take over their lives. Max Riemelt plays the campsite owner Ben Sandmann and his darker copy. Koroll went through breath-hold training for the underwater scenes, much of which were shot in a vast water studio in Belgium, and said the fog-filled mudflat set gave her the feeling of standing in an in-between world. All six episodes went online in the ZDFmediathek on 3 October 2026, and ZDFneo aired them back to back on 21 October.

A week later, on 28 October, Prime Video released Drive – The Pretenders worldwide. Directed by Sergej Moya for Bavaria Fiction and adapted from Tamara Lush’s Wattpad novel Drive, it casts Koroll as Sarah Jenkins, a racing mechanic who agrees to pose as the fiancée of the sport’s most scandal-prone driver, Amin Baahmed’s Dante Annunziata, secretly hoping the deal will get her behind the wheel herself. It went straight to the top of Amazon’s weekly chart of the most-watched Prime Video Original films for the week of 26 October to 1 November.

Both characters are women whose identity is a performance, a fake fiancée and a young woman who does not know whose daughter she is, and neither of them needs Tina. With the two releases landing within a month of each other, her next casting choice is the one to watch: it will show whether the industry still sees the girl a country watched grow up, or the actress who has spent a decade arguing, without disowning anything, that she is someone else.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Amin Baahmed, Lisa-Marie Koroll, Bibi & Tina, Die Düsteren

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