Paula Kalenberg, the actress the German industry never learned how to file

Paula Kalenberg

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

Born	November 9, 1986 Dinslaken, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Krabat, Kokowääh 2, The Cloud
Awards	New Faces · Lilli Palmer & Curd Jürgens Memorial Camera, Goldene Kamera · Askania Shooting Star

Ask what kind of actress Paula Kalenberg is and, by her own account, the industry has never settled on an answer. “I think I always confuse people a little,” she told the German press service teleschau. Nobody could place her by age or by type; offers come in for women barely out of their teens and for women in their mid-thirties. “They don’t know what to do with me,” she said, and laughed. Over a career that began in her early teens, that confusion has worked more like a defence.

The question matters more now that she is carrying a series. In Friends Sex and Games, Prime Video’s German remake of the Mexican hit El juego de las llaves, she plays Anna, a wedding planner who has been with her husband since school and keeps circling one small, brutal question: are we boring? The show’s answer involves a bowl of house keys and some eighty intimate scenes, by the count of its intimacy coordinator, Emilia Bähr. It is a lead role in a series built on exposure, and it falls to an actress who has always kept her private self at arm’s length.

Kalenberg was born on 9 November 1986 in Dinslaken, in North Rhine-Westphalia, and grew up mostly in Bielefeld, where she attended a Waldorf school. Her mother raised her alone; her father comes from Croatia, and she has called herself “actually half-Croatian”. The family moved often; the fixed point was the Allgäu, where her grandmother’s family comes from. At 14 she heard about a casting call on the radio, went along, and landed her first television film, Hanna – wo bist du?.

The early years were the usual German apprenticeship in crime series, with a leading part in the Tatort episode “Bermuda” in 2003. Leander Haußmann then cast her as Luise Miller in his 2005 television film of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, opposite August Diehl. The breakthrough came a year later with Die Wolke (The Cloud), Gregor Schnitzler’s adaptation of Gudrun Pausewang’s novel about a nuclear accident in Germany. As Hannah, a schoolgirl fleeing radioactive rain with her younger brother, she held a disaster film together on her face alone, and the magazine Bunte gave her its New Faces Award for best young actress.

The run that followed is the part of her filmography best known outside Germany. In Marco Kreuzpaintner’s Krabat, from Otfried Preußler’s novel, she played Kantorka, the girl who leads the village singing at Easter and whose love breaks a sorcerer’s hold over his apprentices, opposite David Kross and Daniel Brühl. Margarethe von Trotta cast her as Sister Klara in Vision, about Hildegard von Bingen. In 2009 she received the Lilli Palmer and Curd Jürgens Memorial Camera, the Goldene Kamera prize for young actors, and in 2011 the Askania Shooting Star Award.

The boldest choice of that period was also the one that went worst. Oskar Roehler’s Jud Süß – Film ohne Gewissen (Jew Suss: Rise and Fall), about the making of the Nazi propaganda film, cast her as Kristina Söderbaum, the star married to its director, Veit Harlan. It competed at the Berlinale in 2010, drew boos at the press screening and was taken apart in print: ZDF’s arts programme aspekte called it an undecided, overdrawn melodrama, and Spiegel Online wrote that it worked miserably as the melodrama of a seduced man. The cast largely escaped the fire, but the film closed the most ambitious stretch of her cinema career on a sour note.

What came next is the part a prestige reading of her career leaves out. Much of the following decade ran through prime-time television: a Rosamunde Pilcher mini-series, the coastal crime comedy Heiter bis tödlich: Nordisch herb, Xaver Schwarzenberger’s ARD film Clarissas Geheimnis. Kalenberg has been blunt about what such scripts give women. Of one romantic comedy she said it was “once again the second role next to a strong leading man”, while her character barely has a biography. Her own rule is that “it’s the somewhat unpleasant traits that make a character human for me”, and in many of the women’s roles she is offered, she said, “that just isn’t possible”. The career reads less as a fall from Krabat than as a long negotiation for permission to be disliked.

The negotiation has gone best when a director let her push. In Systemfehler – Wenn Inge tanzt she took the title role, the classmate a school band mocks in its only hit before she ends up playing guitar in it, opposite Tim Oliver Schultz. When the two were paired again for the ARD romantic comedy Song für Mia, she said she had worked with the director to give a character written as a pure do-gooder some edges and dark sides. The Ferdinand von Schirach adaptation Der weiße Äthiopier, opposite Jürgen Vogel, gave her harder material.

In 2021 she played Maria in Du Sie Er & Wir (The Four of Us), Florian Gottschick’s Netflix tragicomedy about two couples who swap partners for four weeks under a single rule, no sex, and took a supporting part in Franziska Stünkel’s Nahschuss, inspired by the last execution in East Germany. The ZDF Christmas film Zitronenherzen cast her in 2024 as Carla, a television journalist dropped into the pulp-romance world written by her estranged mother, played by Leslie Malton. From April 2025 she partnered Max Hubacher as the younger detective duo of RTL’s Morden auf Öd – Ein Insel-Krimi.

Friends Sex and Games arrived worldwide on Prime Video on 16 October 2026 in eight episodes, directed by Barbara Kronenberg and Sinje Köhler, with Fridolin Sandmeyer as Anna’s husband, Paul. Set next to Du Sie Er & Wir, it looks like a subject she keeps coming back to: settled couples testing rules they never wrote down. The first German verdict was mixed in a revealing way. Reviewing for the dpa news agency, Gregor Tholl found the series made with heart and humour and lovingly acted, but the characters far too chic and the whole thing perhaps too stuffy for its own subject. For an actress who argues that unpleasantness is what makes a character human, playing it safe is the charge worth answering.

Off screen she lives in Berlin and has been patron of the Mädchenhaus Bielefeld, an organisation supporting girls and young women in the city where she grew up, since 2007. A committed social-media presence, she has said, needs “that healthy dose of narcissism and exhibitionism”, and she does not have it.

With the first season of Friends Sex and Games now streaming, the test ahead is whether a second would let Anna become as difficult as Kalenberg has always wanted her women to be.