Max Simonischek: Amplitudes

Mr. Simonischek, who are you?

Who I am? I ask myself that same question every day. And I think that the answer to this question lies in the search for an answer. I ask myself questions like: What do I want out of life? How do I want to live? What kind of people do I want to surround myself with? What is important to me? What do I want to stand up for? And I’ve decided to never give a final answer to these questions, but to keep asking them.

You do theater, work in television, can be seen on the big screen and direct. Do you get a certain sense of yourself in all of these diverse activities and find yourself in the process?

That’s a nice way of putting it, but I’d like to expand on that a little. My job is like a playing field, it is a protected island, a natural habitat where I can live out the emotional amplitudes of life. Of course, you can ask yourself which came first: the chicken or the egg. In any case, my profession gives me the freedom to live the way I want to live. I don’t want to stay in the perfumed middle ground and coast through life; I yearn for the amplitudes. And I mean in both directions: up and down. That helps in difficult times, when you doubt yourself, your job, society or life. That’s perhaps how I would put it.

Is it the restlessness involved in being an actor that attracts you to the profession?

That’s it exactly! It’s this unconventional life, the opportunity to work in different places. I can get to know a lot of people closely and intensely in a setting where it’s all about overcoming feelings of shame, breaking down inhibitions and opening up emotionally. Especially in theater. Theater is an extreme, which is why I’m so attached to it, more so than film. It’s a longing that I have in my life. And unfortunately, I see society moving in the opposite direction.

What do you mean by that?

I mean that everything in our society is economized, and everything has to have a purpose. You can’t fail, you have to succeed. In theater, on the other hand, we use resources wastefully, you have to seek out failure if you want to be creative and innovative.

Athletes and creative people often talk about flow. Does that also exist in acting?

My father once recommended a book to me. It’s called The Inner Game. It takes a psychological look at tennis, and there’s this amazing similarity between acting and tennis, you just have to translate what the book is talking about to acting. In sports and in the acting profession, it’s all about being in the moment, in the situation. That sounds a bit drier than “flow”, but it means the same thing. It’s about this ideal state that you need to achieve on stage, so to speak. That’s also what I mean when I talk about waste. It’s about giving yourself completely over to something. Goethe writes in Faust, “Fair moment linger on!” He was talking about living in the moment, with all your senses, with full perception and concentration. I think that’s one of life’s challenges. I also notice with my children how much love comes back to me when I’m in the moment with them. It’s much easier for children. They can throw themselves into it from one moment to the next, with all the associated disappointments and triumphs.

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→  Read the full interview in rampstyle #33 “When You Know, You Know”.