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Alexander Scheer, born June 1, 1976, in East Berlin, worked four years in several casual jobs as mailman, cemetery gardener, or bartender after finishing school. Scheer's experiences with drugs during this time provided the basis for a story in Jörg Böckem's book "Danach war alles anders". Scheer then appeared in several commercials before making his acting debut at the Berlin off theatre TiK at the end of the 1990s.
The autodidact who never went to drama school made his breakthrough performance in Leander Haußmanns "Sonnenallee" ("Sun Alley"), Scheer's first feature film. Scheer then performed under Haußmann at Bochum's Schauspielhaus in classic plays such as "Much Ado About Nothing" or "Leonce and Lena". In 2002 Scheer became a regular cast member of Berlin's Volksbühne. One year later, in 2003, he and short film director André Jagusch founded the video production company "9 O"Clock Pictures" and produced trash video films such as "American Showdown". Among Scheer's best known films are the satire "Viktor Vogel – Commercial Man" ("Advertising Rules!") starring Götz George and Sven Taddicken's "Mein Bruder, der Vampir" ("Getting My Brother Laid").
Scheer who has been dedicated to art house films during his career now plays the part of rock legend Keith Richards in "Das wilde Leben" ("8 Miles High"), a film biography of Uschi Obermaier.
He continued to perform as lead singer and guitarist in several bands. In 2009, the trade paper "Theater heute" vorted Alexander Scheer Actor of the Year. The commendation was also based on his lead performance in Frank Castorf's staging of "Edmund Kean" at the Volksbühne in Berlin.
Scheer returned to the screen with roles in Sven Taddicken's 2010 adventure film "Zwölf Meter ohne Kopf" ("13 Paces Without a Head") and the political thriller "Carlos – Der Schakal", which premiered at the 2010 Cannes IFF. After starring in the drama "Im Alter von Ellen" ("At Ellen's Age"), he played a rock musician in Lars Becker's made-for-TV comedy "Schief gewickelt" (2010. ), Santa Claus in the theatrical release "Als der Weihnachtsmann vom Himmel fiel" ("When Santa Fell to Earth", 2011) and an upright government administrator fighting corruption in a small town in the TV satire "Eine Hand wäscht die andere" (2012).
Scheer next joined the ensemble cast of Klaus Lemke's low-budget production "Kein großes Ding", which premiered at the Viennale. He then starred as an East-German who emigrates to the West in Christian Schwochow's award-winning drama "Westen" ("West"), which opened in March 2014. The same year, he appeared in the youth drama "Der Nachtmahr" ("The Nightmare") and portrayed German post-punk icon Blixa Bargeld in Oskar Roehler's "Tod den Hippies, es lebe der Punk" ("Punk Berlin 1982").
On television he was part of the ensemble of the highly acclaimed "Tatort" episode "Im Schmerz geboren" (2014) with Ulrich Tukur and Ulrich Matthes. Scheer also remained active as a theatre actor. Between 2011 and 2017 he appeared on stage at the Berliner Volksbühne in Dostoyevsky's "The Gambler" and had leading roles in "The Brothers Karamazov" (2015) and "Faust" (2012/2017).
On the cinema screen he was seen as a crook in the gangster comedy "Schrotten!" ("Scrappin'", 2016), as Friedrich Nietzsche in the biopic "Lou Andreas-Salomé" (2016) and as communist theorist Wilhelm Weitling in "Der junge Karl Marx" ("The Young Karl Marx", 2017). In the American adventure film "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales" ("Pirates of the Caribbean: Salazars Rache", 2017) he played a supporting role as the evil pirate captain Teague at a young age.
His television films of these years include Lars Becker's psychiatry drama "Der mit dem Schlag" (2016) and Wolfgang Murnberger's comedy "Schnitzel geht immer" (2017). In the multiple award-winning two-parter "Gladbeck" ("54 Hours", 2018), a reconstruction of the hostage crisis of Gladbeck in the year 1988, he played one of the two hostage-takers and was nominated for the German TV Award, together with Sascha Alexander Gersak.
For Andreas Dresen, Scheer was in front of the camera in 2017 in the title role of "Gundermann" (start: 2018), a film biography of the combative but also contradictory GDR songwriter Gerhard Gundermann. For his charismatic portrayal Scheer was awarded the Bavarian Film Prize and the Günter Rohrbach Film Prize in 2018 and the German Film Prize in 2019.
The following year, he played a key role as a Nazi officer in the Norwegian war drama "The Spy" (2019), which earned him a nomination for the Norwegian Amanda Award. The series "Sløborn" (2020), about a small North Sea island where a deadly virus spreads, was a German-Danish co-production. In Oskar Roehler's Fassbinder film "Enfant Terrible," Scheer embodied the legendary Andy Warhol. In Thomas Stuber's horror series "Hausen," he played an ominous homeless man.
Scheer played again under the direction of Dresen in the drama "Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush" in fall 2020, in which he embodied the lawyer Bernhard Docke, who campaigned for the release of Murat Kurnaz from Guantanamo.