SPIEGEL ONLINE: You said recently that you fear the brutalization of society. Do not many of the thrillers and thrillers contribute to your playing? There were two and a half bodies in 2017 on average per "crime scene".
Moehring: I do not believe that. Who relaxed in a movie, does not come out and has the urge to knock. From a movie you go out rather touched, confused, happy or bored. Sure, it can be a risk to watch a movie: You go to the cinema in a relaxed mood and watch a great, disturbing film and then everything is different, because the film has taken one so and brings everything out of balance. But whoever gets violent can not blame it on a single movie experience. That's way too easy.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Did you encounter violence, brutality and death in real life?
Möhring: In my wild years, when I was about eighteen, someone stabbed a knife through my jacket from behind, later someone held a gun to my head as I sat on the bike. I have also seen real dead, was there when someone was killed, and even in a mass brawl. So yes.
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Wotan Wilke Möhring: Waldorf student, chief investigator, heartbreakerSPIEGEL ONLINE: You have experienced much more violence than the average German!
Möhring: But I do not know if the gun was real. Besides, nothing bad happened to me. Once, however, skinheads wanted to storm our punk party. Beat skins and punks are beaten, I always found that wrong. You have to fight back. So I said, let's go out and expel them. Then the door closed behind me and I was the only one outside. I woke up in the hospital with a concussion and other injuries. I could not remember anything.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Can you think well into evil characters?
Möhring: Yes, because even the worst offenders do the right thing in their logic. It is very interesting to explore this completely different perspective. This explains, I believe, the fascination of evil. The evil has crossed the line with ultimate consequence and takes liberties that we would never dare.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Is the portrayal of hard-nosed guys in the film a kind of training for actual dangerous situations?
Moehring: No. The reality is much more blatant. So, seeing wild animals in the zoo is like cinema. But when you actually meet a lion in the park, your heart is thumping. A slipping scooter next to us on the street, a woman falling down on a bicycle, takes us more than a murder in the movie. On the screen, things become bearable that we can hardly bear in reality. That's because the human eye perceives a lot more than any camera, and we use all our senses outside of life.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Her father died in 2004 due to a traffic accident in her arms. Is this also a kind of experience of violence?
Möhring: If your father is lying there and the blood is coming, and you know he can not see you anymore - that's a tremendous experience in the truest sense. It took me a long time to accept that as a son. Of course, it will be remembered how the birth of my children remains in the positive such an archaic memory. My children were born after that. The thought that one goes and the other comes, has comforted me.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Your children, two girls and a boy, are 5, 7 and 9 years old. Are you watching movies in which you are playing?
Möhring: My children are too young, many things are too blatant for them, they do not even want to watch the old Räuber-Hotzenplotz movie. You have never seen a movie with me. They know their father differently, do not like the transformations, for example that sometimes my hair or beard is changed. Once they visited me at Winnetou shooting in Croatia. An arrow hit me and I fell off the horse. My son still talks about it today. For a while he thought Dad was always shot dead at work, he thought that was stupid.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: When did you watch your first crime scene?
Möhring: I secretly saw my first crime scene with my aunt. It was just "matriculation certificate" with Nastassja Kinski. I was about ten years old and had serious nightmares for months.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you think there are scenes of violence that should not be shown to adults?
Möhring: In well-made films you do not see certain things. For example, villains go into a room with a prisoner and the onlooker simply knows that someone is being beaten up. The camera does not have to go. The worst will happen in our own imagination.
Video: Wotan Wilke Möhring - Mister Multitalent
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Riva movie production
SPIEGEL ONLINE: You play in the series "Parfum" with. There are also scenes that the viewer feels like a lot. Cut out body parts were not previously shown so freely. A sign that we dull against violence?
Möhring: I do not think so. Our filming is no more drastic than the book that's from the eighties. A film that leaves no scope for your own interpretation, runs the risk that we as a spectator emotionally no longer come along. When I read "The Perfume" by Patrick Süskind, I produce these pictures myself, they are created in my head. I am then a director, actor, cameraman. I can not resist that the letters in my head connect to such pictures. I find that much more intense than movie blood.