“I missed Theater Null,” says Oliver Mascucci before rehearsals. He is sitting on a sofa in the Harry Potter lounge in Hamburg’s Mehr! wearing dark jeans and a black T-shirt. Theatre. He has actually been out of the theater business for seven years and most recently played in Vienna. The Burgtheater was like a final stop because “it couldn’t get any higher” for an actor, he says.
Masucci continued to film, starred in the Netflix series “Dark” from 2017 to 2020, portrayed Rainer Werner Fassbinder in “Enfant Terrible” and the notary Josef Bartok in the “Schachnovelle”. Then the jump to Hollywood. In “Fantastic Beasts 3: Dumbledore’s Secrets” he played the Minister for Magic Anton Vogel. Before he ended up in the magical world, he was a fan himself, reading the Potter novels to his children and watching the films with them. For the play “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”, a story sequel that begins at the end of the last volume, he makes a short theater stop in Hamburg. “I felt like doing magic again,” he says.
On the sofa in the lounge he feels his biceps. He now does two hours of exercise every morning – endurance, equipment training, because the work is physically demanding. “Otherwise I won’t be able to handle it anymore.” Because everything in the theater takes place live, the 55-year-old is “nervous as hell” and has nightmares: “For two months I’ve been dreaming that I’m standing down in the catacombs and don’t know where the performance is. I have the text, the Scene hasn’t even been rehearsed yet, but it’s already being pushed onto the stage.” He then wakes up bathed in sweat.
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