Maciej Musiał, the sitcom son who bet his savings on Kieślowski’s Dekalog

Maciej Musiał

Photo: Telemagazyn / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 11, 1995 Warsaw, Poland
Occupation	Actor, producer and television presenter
Known for	The Peasants, Tonight You're Sleeping with Me
Awards	Telekamera, TV Hope

For a large part of Poland, Maciej Musiał is still the teenager on the family sofa: Tomek Boski, one of the sons in the public-television sitcom Rodzinka.pl, a part he has played on and off for most of his life. That picture sits awkwardly beside the other thing he has become, the producer who by his own account put his savings into the rights to reinterpret Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog and then brought in Asghar Farhadi to direct the first film. The question his career is asking now is whether the festival critics who decide such things will accept a sitcom star as the custodian of one of European cinema’s most revered works.

Acting came with the family. His parents, Anna and Andrzej Musiał, are both actors, and his maternal grandfather, Marian Markiewicz, fought with the Home Army in Vilnius during Operation Tempest. He was working in front of a camera before he was ten.

Musiał, who was born in Warsaw on 11 February 1995, made that first appearance with a single episode of the series Plebania in 2004, and by 2008 he had regular roles in Ojciec Mateusz and Hotel pod żyrafą i nosorożcem. School never quite kept pace with the work. After secondary school in Warsaw he enrolled in philosophy at the University of Warsaw in 2014 and left before the year was out. In 2016 he started the acting course at the AST National Academy of Theatre Arts in Kraków and finished it with a master’s degree in 2021, by which point he had been one of the most recognisable faces on Polish television for a decade.

The recognition came from Rodzinka.pl, which he joined in 2011 and stayed with until 2020, returning to the role in 2025. Around it he built a career in Polish television drama, from Hotel 52 and Krew z krwi to Czas honoru – Powstanie, the 2014 Warsaw Uprising season of the wartime saga, in which he played the insurgent Apacz. A year earlier he had carried Mój biegun as Jan Mela, the teenager who lost an arm and part of a leg and went on to reach both poles. Television also made him a presenter: he hosted The Voice of Poland from 2013 to 2020 and has been back in the role since 2024. In 2016 he won a Telekamera as the medium’s brightest hope.

The more revealing move came in 2018. Musiał was the originator of 1983, the alternate-history thriller that became Netflix‘s first Polish original series, served as one of its executive producers and took the lead as Kajetan Skowron, a law student, opposite Robert Więckiewicz. Netflix kept calling. He appeared as Sir Lazlo, a knight at the court of Queen Calanthe, in two episodes of The Witcher in 2019, and joined the main cast of 1899, the multilingual mystery from the creators of Dark, as Olek, a Polish stoker aboard the steamship Kerberos. In 2019 Forbes put him on its 30 Under 30 Europe list for entertainment.

On the big screen he has moved between commercial comedy and something more ambitious. He was part of the romantic ensemble Miłość jest wszystkim and starred in Druga połowa, then took the part of Jasio in The Peasants, the painted-animation adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s novel by DK Welchman and Hugh Welchman, which Poland sent to the Oscars. On SkyShowtime he found the role that even his sceptics tend to exempt, the journalist Bastian Strzygoń in the crime series Śleboda, opposite Maria Dębska.

The doubts about Musiał have never been about visibility. His face has sold mobile contracts, bank accounts, burgers, whisky and fizzy drinks, and in May 2023 a Warsaw district court fined him because online campaigns he fronted for whisky and beer broke Poland’s advertising rules. The same year the Netflix romance Tonight You’re Sleeping with Me earned him three nominations at the Węże, Poland’s answer to the Razzies: worst actor, worst on-screen duo with Roma Gąsiorowska, and most embarrassing scene, for a sequence in which he dances with an iron. Writing in April 2026, the Spider’s Web critic Adam Kudyba put the problem plainly: Musiał was once tipped at home and abroad for the top tier of actors, and in Kudyba’s view that plan did not really work out. Producing is where Musiał has chosen to answer him.

His reply is Dekalog. In an April interview with GQ Polska, Musiał said he had bought the rights to a specific Kieślowski work seven years earlier and begun the process of its contemporary reinterpretation, a deal he says became possible because the previous rights holder was late with a payment. He works on it with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, Kieślowski’s co-writer, and the plan is a cycle of new films, each from a different director. The first, Farhadi’s Parallel Tales, moves the material to Paris with Isabelle Huppert, Catherine Deneuve and Vincent Cassel and is widely reported to draw on the sixth chapter, known as A Short Film About Love. It premiered at Cannes in May and was received coldly: Variety’s Owen Gleiberman found it slow and shapeless, and early reviews on Rotten Tomatoes ran at 23 percent positive.

The second film changed the conversation. Possible Love, Lee Chang-dong‘s first feature in eight years, opens with a dedication to the tenth chapter of Dekalog and stars Jeon Do-yeon and Sul Kyung-gu. It played in competition at Venice in September, where it won the FIPRESCI critics’ prize, and its credits list Musiał as an executive producer. It opened in South Korean cinemas on 23 September.

His acting autumn is just as crowded. Pionek, the sequel to Śleboda, arrived on SkyShowtime on 10 September with Musiał and Dębska back as Strzygoń and the anthropologist Anka Serafin, now chasing a murder that echoes the method of Norman Pionek, the killer known as the Vampire of Szombierki. Julia Rogowska’s Czas, który nie nadszedł, a drama with Agata Kulesza set in a world that has outlawed old age, reached cinemas on 16 October, and Janusz Zaorski’s Syrenka Picassa, with Andrzej Seweryn, follows on 23 October after competing for the Golden Lions in Gdynia. Away from sets he runs Cafe Pląs, a café in Warsaw’s Królikarnia park known for dance nights to live music.

The next date that matters is 6 November, when Possible Love reaches Netflix. After that, the measure of Musiał’s gamble will be the Dekalog chapters still to come, and whether the actor Poland met as Tomek Boski can keep persuading the directors he wants.

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Tags: actors, Lee Chang-dong, Possible Love, Maciej Musiał, Asghar Farhadi, Krzysztof Kieślowski

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