Christoph Waltz

Christoph Waltz made an unforgettable Hollywood debut when he portrayed the delectably wicked Nazi officer Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds (2009)—a character that director Quentin Tarantino once feared was “unplayable.” That role won Waltz an Academy Award for best supporting actor, as did his next outing with Tarantino in Django Unchained (2012). Known for his gleefully arch comic performances, the Austrian-German actor has since brought to life a gallery of complex characters on the big screen—including memorable villains opposite characters such as James Bond and Tarzan.

Education and early career

Waltz seemed destined for a career in the theatrical arts. His parents were set and costume designers, and his great-grandfather and some of his grandparents had been actors. As a child he frequented the opera and took an interest in classical music, encouraged by his stepfather, Alexander Steinbrecher, a composer and writer. Though he briefly considered singing opera, Waltz eventually chose to study acting at the Max Reinhardt Seminar of the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna. Enamored by American movies, he later attended the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York City, where he was influenced by thespian Stella Adler’s approach to analyzing scripts.

He made a few appearances in Austrian television movies and a West German TV series in the late 1970s and went on in the succeeding decades to have an astonishingly prolific if low-key career in European film and television; in addition, he regularly performed onstage. By the 1990s Waltz had become a familiar presence on British and Austrian TV crime shows and comedies, with occasional forays onto the big screen. While it was a financially rewarding career, Waltz by his own account found it to be creatively unfulfilling.

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A life-changing role: Inglourious Basterds

During the development of his World War II fantasy Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino was on the verge of shutting down filming because he was quickly losing confidence that he could find a German actor to play the primary antagonist, SS Col. Hans Landa—a role that required a deep familiarity with dialogue in French and English in addition to German. However, all that changed when Waltz auditioned for the part. The role of the terrifyingly charming killer, the villain of the anti-Nazi revenge story, was perfectly suited to Waltz’s talents, and, though Brad Pitt had the leading role in the movie, it was Waltz’s multifaceted performance that caught the attention of audiences and critics alike. Waltz, for his part, credited Tarantino for reviving his love of acting. The tour de force garnered him best supporting actor awards at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Awards, the Golden Globes, and the Academy Awards, as well as an award for best actor at the Cannes film festival.

Another award-winning turn with Tarantino and playing the bad guy

Waltz’s breakout role in Inglourious Basterds led to parts in other American movies, among them Water for Elephants, The Three Musketeers, and Carnage (all released in 2011). Waltz’s second Tarantino collaboration, in Django Unchained (2012), proved just as incendiary as the first. His character—one of the heroes of a revenge fantasy set in the antebellum American South—is complex, troubling, and delightful. Tarantino wrote the part specifically for Waltz, who flawlessly inhabited the role of the erudite dentist turned bounty hunter. Waltz again earned best supporting actor awards at the Oscars, Golden Globes, and BAFTA Awards.

Waltz then starred in director Terry Gilliam’s dystopian science-fiction drama The Zero Theorem (2013). He appeared as the manipulative husband of painter Margaret Keane in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes (2014), as the villain Blofeld (also known as Oberhauser) in the James Bond films Spectre (2015) and No Time to Die (2021), and as Belgian colonist Leon Rom (a historical figure known for his cruelty in the Congo Free State) in the adventure film The Legend of Tarzan (2016).

Branching out in later work

In 2017 Waltz starred in the historical drama Tulip Fever and in Downsizing, a satire about people who elect to undergo a medical procedure that causes them to shrink. Two years later he appeared in Alita: Battle Angel. Also in 2019 Waltz directed his first feature film, Georgetown, a crime drama in which he starred as a real-life social climber accused of killing his wealthy wife. He later was cast in Woody Allen’s romantic comedy Rifkin’s Festival (2020). In 2021 he appeared in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, a dramedy about the final edition of a newspaper’s magazine supplement. In the animated film Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022), Waltz provided the voice of Count Volpe. In 2025 he reunited with del Toro in an adaptation of Frankenstein.

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Waltz has also appeared in a few American TV shows, most prominently as the mastermind of a deadly hunting contest in Most Dangerous Game (2020–23) and as a sinister, inscrutable corporate strategist in The Consultant (2023). He also guest starred in the fifth season of Only Murders in the Building in 2025.

Besides his work in film and television, Waltz has sporadically indulged his love for the opera as a director. In 2013 he helmed a production of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Four years later he staged Giuseppe Verdi’s comic opera Falstaff.