The Curious Rebel

There are actors who leave their roles behind as soon as the curtain falls. PHILIPP HOCHMAIR is not one of them. Spend any time with him and it soon becomes clear that, for Hochmair, the line between character and self is porous. Somewhere in that space between the two lies his curiosity. It is not simply part of his profession; it is what drives him and, as he tells it, has done since long before he knew he wanted to become an actor.

His mother, a doctor, took him to the Burgtheater as a child, not out of any artistic ambition, but because the law requires a doctor to be present once the audience reaches a certain size. Hochmair grew up behind the scenes, while home life, as he recalls it, was relatively sheltered from the world beyond. That sense of isolation only fuelled his curiosity. “Curiosity has been a major driving force throughout my entire life,” he says. Listening to him, it becomes clear that this is more than a passing observation. It is almost a summary of how he has lived.

Perhaps most striking is that his curiosity seems to flourish when met with resistance. As a child, Hochmair struggled with reading, with prescribed reading lists, with literature in general. Today, he immerses himself in Kafka, Schiller and Hofmannsthal, among the most demanding writers in the German-language canon. What was once a weakness became the foundation of one of his greatest strengths. The same pattern emerges throughout our conversation: Hochmair is drawn not to what comes easily, but to what challenges him.

There is something almost contradictory about this when set against the way he lives. For a man whose diary is packed with performances and filming days, often scheduled down to the minute, Hochmair talks about his life as though much of it has simply happened to him. “I’ve never chosen anything; it’s always come to me,” he says of his career, a statement that seems almost at odds with his meticulous organisation. Staying curious, for him, also means knowing when to loosen his grip. He deliberately leaves room for nothing to happen, allowing something new to emerge in its place. He talks about fallow land, about cycles of harvesting and producing that need periods of rest before they can become fertile again.

Nowhere is this approach more evident than in what has become his life’s work, Jedermann Reloaded. It began almost by accident. After a chance encounter on the way to the car park, the former artistic director of Thalia Theater, Joachim Lux, simply told him, “You are Jedermann.” What started as a stop-gap has since evolved into an ongoing project that Hochmair has spent years reinventing: with a DJ, a rock band, a classical orchestra, even spontaneous guests from the street. In October, it will take yet another form when he performs for the first time at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie with his band Die Elektrohand Gottes. It is a concert hall rather than a theatre, and its acoustics are hardly an obvious fit for a rock band. “You can’t just go there and churn out a paint-by-numbers performance,” he says. That is precisely what excites him: being somewhere the tried and tested no longer works.

Even in his annual appearance as the classical Jedermann on Salzburg’s Domplatz, part of a tradition more than a century old, Hochmair looks for ways to unsettle the routine. There are last-minute cast changes, spontaneous interludes, or simply the unpredictability of the weather during an open-air performance. He takes his cue from the Austrian actor Otto Schenk: “Every good actor should always be a little bit bad.” Perfection, Hochmair believes, ultimately leaves you unsatisfied, like a dinner where everything is good but nothing stays with you, feels overcooked.

That attraction to the unexpected also finds its way into a less obvious part of his life: his new collaboration with the jewellery house Thomas Sabo. What might look from the outside like a conventional brand partnership is, according to Hochmair, something far more personal and almost accidental. A designer approached him after noticing that silver jewellery had long been part of the way he dressed. From there, a creative dialogue developed over the course of a year and a half. “I’d constantly been on the lookout for jewellery that suited me,” he explains, “and suddenly there’s a designer who gives me the chance to help shape the designs myself.” Once again, there was no grand plan. The opportunity came to him, and he followed where it led.

Hochmair is at his most open when the conversation turns to a subject he considers sensitive, and one he still appears to be working out how to talk about: the two years he spent exploring psilocybin in therapeutically guided sessions at an institute in Amsterdam. He didn’t do it to get high, but for the process of gaining insight, one that complemented thirty years of acting and the self-reflection that comes with it. “It has changed my life so positively, or picked me up at exactly the right moment,” he says. He stresses, it was never about partying, but about seeing his own situation from a different perspective. Tellingly, Hochmair wonders how the subject can be discussed without turning it into something sensational. He is clearly conscious of how he is perceived, but does not want that awareness to dictate what he says.

In the end, Hochmair describes himself as naïve, deliberately so, he adds, because he sees naivety as a prerequisite for curiosity. He compares himself to the Arthurian hero Parzival, riding fearlessly through the valley, with disaster simply riding alongside him. It is a romantic image, perhaps, but one that suits an artist who, at 52, is still more interested in where the journey might lead than in settling into everything he has already achieved.

CREDITS:
Styling LENA LAUER
Concept NINA DAHMS
Photography DIANA DINGI
Creative Production JOHANNA ERDL, ANTONIA DIPNER
Hair & Make-Up SYDNEY RAAB
Photo Assistant MATVEY KRIVOLAPOV
Location KONRAD TÖNZ BAR