Richard Sammel (born October 13, 1960 in Heidelberg, West Germany) is a German actor.
He has appeared in more than eighty films since 1991, and is perhaps best known to Western audiences for the role of Sgt. Rachtmann in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and his regular role on The Strain as Thomas Eichhorst.
Sammel speaks five languages — his native German, English, French, Italian, and Spanish, all of which he is fluent in. He's dubbed some animated and live-action roles in French whenever his German accent comes in handy.
Selected Film Roles
- 1997 Life Is Beautiful as German Lieutenant at Station
- 1998 Taxi as the leader of the Mercedes gang
- 2006 OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies as Colonel Gerhard Moeller
- 2006 Casino Royale as Adolph Gettler
- 2009 Inglourious Basterds as Sgt. Rachtman
- 2011 The Berlin Project as Alexander
- 2014 3 Days to Kill as The Wolf
- 2015 Road47 as Colonel Jurgen Mayer
- 2021 Spencer as Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Television Roles
- 2010-2017 A French Village as Heinrich Müller
- 2014 The Strain as Thomas Eichhorst
- 2020 The Head as Erik Osterland
Associated Tropes:
- Actor-Shared Background: Very few of his characters have a Fake Nationality, he's played mostly Germans in foreign productions.
- Icy Blue Eyes: Has a very piercing pair◊ of 'em. They're even mentioned in The Strain as being one of the reasons he's so off-setting. "His eyes - they're so intense!" Usually mentioned along with his Villainous Cheekbones.
- Typecasting: Has played a Nazi or World War II German soldier in about one fifth of his on-screen roles. He's been asked about it in interviews and said that he understands why, and thinks of it as "generational guilt"."I've worked a lot in this period, because that's my story, my backpack I got when I was born. I'm guilty by... Generational Guilt, let's say. So I took care of it and what I was so disturbed with was the fact that they tried to explain the Nazism by the fact they're all sadists and brutal beasts, which is not the case! It was the most evolved, industrialized, philosophically, culturally advanced country in the world at that time, but the fact is that if all this culture and all this knowledge and all this intelligence does not prevent a human being from falling into a disastrous ideology? Even those guys were completely human. They were completely capable of taking care of their kids and their wives and then torturing... That's the weird thing, that's the unbelievable thing that we can't bear and which we can't explain. So that's where we have to dig in. [...] [As] a German actor, you take care of this part of history as you would as a Jewish actor in Tel Aviv, or as an American actor, look at how many movies you've done about the Second World War, because you engaged in the Second World War [...] [It's] a burden and it's a chance. The burden is that you don't want to be — How do you say? — just put into a small box and then when they need a Nazi guy, oh they think of you. And my pride is that I actually refused a lot more projects about the Nazism period than I accept."