Loes Haverkort, the introvert at the head of Netflix’s The Perfect Lie

Loes Haverkort

Photo: Pvt pauline / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	January 19, 1981 Almelo, Netherlands
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Redbad, Obsession, iHostage

Karen van der Made, the woman Loes Haverkort plays in The Perfect Lie, wants one thing from the wealthy couples of Bergen: to be let in. Haverkort has said she built the character against herself. Karen is assertive and confrontational; the actress describes herself as the opposite, and that gap drives the Netflix series. A newcomer smiles through the dinners, counts the lies, and keeps digging after a house fire kills one of the hosts. In its first week the seven-episode Dutch thriller sat at the top of Netflix’s non-English television chart.

For viewers outside the Netherlands, that made her a new face. At home she has worked almost without pause for twenty years, moving between repertory theatre, family films, period drama and game shows with an ease that sometimes worked against her. Dutch audiences know her from Wie is de Mol? as much as from the stage. The Perfect Lie, called De Eetclub in the original Dutch, put both halves of that reputation in the same frame.

She grew up in Wierden, a village in the Twente region, after being born in nearby Almelo on 19 January 1981. Her father ran an electronics shop, so everyone knew the family, and she left for the city as soon as she could. At the Toneelacademie Maastricht she trained as an actress, graduating in 2004. Before she had finished she was already on stage with ZT Hollandia under Johan Simons, in the company’s Berlin production of Fall der Götter and in a Richard III in which she played Margaret. With four actress friends she then founded a company of her own, Norfolk.

The theatre remained her workshop. She played Portia in Theu Boermans’s De koopman van Venetië and then Charlotte in his musical Soldaat van Oranje, a role she returned to four years later. Music ran alongside: she sang in a band called Casual and later formed the indie-pop group L O U I S V with her husband, the pianist Floris Verbeij. In 2015 she took the Glenn Close part, Alex, in a Dutch staging of Fatal Attraction adapted by the film’s screenwriter, James Dearden. Critics credited her with turning the stalker into a woman of flesh and blood whose logic slowly stops looking mad.

Her first decade on screen ran through costume and family work: Máxima in the satire Bernhard, schavuit van Oranje, Sophia of Württemberg in De Troon, a part in the children’s film Dik Trom. Leads followed. In Antoinette Beumer’s Rendez-vous she played Simone and sang the title song, “Trouble in Paradise”, with L O U I S V. She headed the comedy Voor elkaar gemaakt, a remake of the German hit Vaterfreuden, played Anouk van Dam in the prison drama Celblok H, and appeared as Frea in Roel Reiné’s Frisian epic Redbad.

British viewers met her as Lena Linderman, the Amsterdam love interest of Marc Warren’s detective in ITV’s Van der Valk. She carried the Videoland series Moedermaffia and played Isabelle Styx in the Flemish crime-horror series Styx. Then came Netflix. In Bobby Boermans’s iHostage, drawn from the 2022 hostage-taking at an Amsterdam Apple Store, she was Lynn, the police negotiator trying to talk an armed man down. The film reached No. 1 on Netflix’s US top 10.

The complication is the game shows. Haverkort won the singing contest It Takes 2 in 2019 and the photography competition Het perfecte plaatje in 2023, and she reached the final of the 2025 anniversary season of Wie is de Mol?, then lost it. That kind of exposure keeps a face familiar and sells theatre tickets, but it can also make a classically trained actress read as a television personality. Her film work in the late 2010s leaned on romantic comedies such as Singel 39 and Gek van geluk, which used her warmth more than her edge. The Perfect Lie changed the conversation. The Golden Calf jury nominated her for best lead role in a drama series, alongside Chris Peters for Basta and Tjitske Reidinga for Pro Deo; Peters took the award at the ceremony on 2 October 2026.

The series arrived worldwide on 10 September 2026 and drew 4.1 million views in its first week. Haverkort attended its premiere while recovering from an operation she had not made public. Days later she disclosed that, roughly three months earlier, sudden mild epileptic seizures had led to a scan and the discovery of a low-grade tumour in the right hemisphere of her brain. Surgeons at Amsterdam’s VUmc removed most of it in an awake operation, with Haverkort performing exercises on the table so they could judge what was safe to take out. The remainder is held in check with medication and needs no further treatment. She has said she told her two children plainly, because talking around it made no sense.

Married to Verbeij since 2012, she lives in Amsterdam-Noord, a district she describes as a village inside the city. It is a quiet return to the kind of place she once couldn’t wait to leave.

The next move is behind the camera. Acht dagen, her directorial debut, premiered at the Netherlands Film Festival: a short written by Quinty Misiedjan in which Stijn de Vries plays a young man who stands at his ex-girlfriend’s door for eight days, growing more desperate, a film about the road to femicide. After twenty years of being cast, Haverkort now decides where the camera looks and how long it stays.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Dutch cinema, Loes Haverkort, The Perfect Lie, Bobby Boermans

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