Matthias Brandt was born October 7, 1961, in West Berlin as the son of Willy Brandt - then Governing Mayor of Berlin and eventually German chancellor – and his wife Rut.

Brandt studied acting at the Hannover School for Music and Theater. Since 1985, he has worked at several German-speaking theaters, including the National Theater Mannheim, the Schauspielhaus Zurich and the Schauspielhaus Bochum.

In addition to his stage work, Matthias Brandt has repeatedly worked in front of the camera during the recent years. He managed to distinguish himself in sophisticated TV movies, which caused a stir among viewers and critics. Some of them even became the subject of public controversy, for example Oliver Storz’s "Im Schatten der Macht" (2003), a dramatized retrospection of the espionage scandal, which forced Willy Brandt to resign as chancellor. In the movie, he portrayed Günther Guillaume, an intelligence agent of East Germany’s secret service who spied on Brandt‘s father.

The highly-praised TV production "In Sachen Kaminski" (2005) was based on a true story as well. Here, Matthias Brandt played a mentally challenged father who joins his wife (played by Juliane Köhler) in a fight for custody of their child. In 2007, Brandt was awarded the Grimme Prize for his role as mailman Enno in "Arnies Welt" (2005). TV movies such as "Mütter Väter Kinder" (2007) and "Contergan" (2007) confirmed his status as a versatile character actor.

In February 2008, Matthias Brandt was awarded the Goldene Kamera as Best German Actor. In the same year, Brandt and his co-star Victoria von Trauttmansdorff achieved a German Film Award nomination for their perfomances in the scenes-from-a-marriage drama "Gegenüber" (2007).

Also in 2007, he appeared in Claudia Garde's "Die Frau am Ende der Straße" alongside Maren Eggert. In the highly acclaimed TV production, he played the husband of a mentally ill woman with whom he moves into a terraced housing estate to lead a supposedly "normal" life as a family. For their portrayal of breaking under the constraints of petit bourgeois happiness, Brandt and Eggert were jointly awarded the German Critics' Prize in 2008. In the same year, Matthias Brandt also received the Golden Camera as Best German Actor for his performances in "Die Frau am Ende der Straße" (2006) and "Nachtschicht" (2007).

Since 2011, Matthias Brandt has appeared regularly in the ARD crime series "Polizeiruf 110," where he investigated as Chief Inspector Hanns von Meuffels in Munich under the direction of Leander Haußmann, Dominik Graf, Christian Petzold and Marco Kreuzpaintner, among others. Brandt received several awards for his performance, including the Bambi in 2011 and 2013 and the Bavarian Television Award for Best Male Actor.

Parallel to his role as TV commissioner, Brandt has also appeared repeatedly in other TV productions, with Raymond Ley's "Eine mörderische Entscheidung" (2013) and Hermine Huntgeburth's "Männertreu" (2014) attracting particular attention. In "Eine mörderische Entscheidung" - based on real events near Kunduz in 2009 - Brandt played an infantry commander in Afghanistan who makes a controversial decision to protect his soldiers yet thereby killing numerous civilians. In "Männertreu," Brandt starred alongside Suzanne von Borsody as a successful businessman and unfaithful husband who becomes increasingly entangled in political and erotic intrigues. Matthias Brandt's performance in these productions also won awards: For both films, he and the respective teams received the Grimme Prize in the fiction competition in 2014 and 2015. For "Männertreu," he additionally received the Bavarian Television Award and the Hessian Film Award for Best Actor in 2015.

In 2016, Matthias Brandt appeared in Maria Schrader's award-winning film biography "Vor der Morgenröte - Stefan Zweig in Amerika" alongside Josef Hader and Barbara Sukowa. The same year saw the publication of his literary debut, "Raumpatrouille," a volume of autobiographical stories that became a bestseller. The book was written in close collaboration with Brandt's stage partner, the musician Jens Thomas. He has been on stage with him for years with the joint programs "Psycho" and "Angst," as well as in 2017 with excerpts from his book as a word-music collage. Brandt's debut novel "Blackbird" followed in 2019.

At the beginning of 2017, Brandt announced that he was quitting "Polizeiruf" in order to devote more time to other film and television projects. His last episode was "Tatorte" (2018) directed by Christian Petzold. He also starred in Petzold’s feature film production "Transit" (2018) that was based on the novel by Anna Seghers. In 2018, Brandt starred in the highly anticipated and most expensive German series to date, "Babylon Berlin," based on the novel by Volker Kutscher (directed by Tom Tykwer, Achim von Borries and Hendrik Handloegten), playing the role of government councilor August Benda.

In 2018, he starred in the film adaptation of Michel Houellebecq's controversial novel "Unterwerfung" alongside Edgar Selge, as well as in the two-person chamber play "Toulouse" alongside Catrin Striebeck. Once again, he received much praise for Jan Bonny's "Wir wären andere Menschen" (2019), in which he embodies a man who, 30 years after the death of his parents, wants to take revenge on the two policemen who shot them. In 2020, he appeared in the six-part miniseries "Das Geheimnis des Totenwaldes", based on a real-life criminal case, and was nominated for the German Acting Award for this role the following year.