Almost 20 years ago, Karl Lagerfeld and Daniel Brühl created an unlikely circle that is now coming full circle. It was when the designer captured the essence of the actor with a camera, who, decades later, has completely metamorphosed to embody the kaiser of fashion in Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, a series that the Disney+ platform has just added to its catalog. The Spanish-German has recovered one of these images and shows it this Monday from his mobile phone, during his visit to Madrid to talk about the project. In it, an introspective Brühl is seen, located on the right edge of the snapshot, looking towards the overhead light that hits him and announces that he is growing up destined for great achievements, without the need for noise.
The two Germans met only that one time in person. And, although they may seem to have antagonistic personalities, there was an almost immediate understanding between them. It happened after the premiere of Goodbye, Lenin! (2003). A fashion magazine had commissioned Lagerfeld to photograph several up-and-coming actors, and Brühl was among them. At one point, the young aspiring movie star decided to move away from him, uncomfortable and embarrassed by the battle of grimaces that his fellow professionals were waging in front of the camera lens, in what they believed would be the cover photo. He kaiser He looked at the dissident Brühl and nodded his head, in a discreet gesture of approval. He offered to take some solo portraits of her. Thanks to this ambitious television project, the interpreter has established contact with an assistant from that distant photo session and has recovered some of his images.
Through Becoming Karl Lagerfeld He has discovered what he defines as “a vulnerable, fragile young man; one of the great romantics, as if he were a character in a Proust novel.” Having to play the Lagerfeld before the character that Lagerfeld himself had invented made him realize that he had to accept the role. “I had an intuition that he told me was not crazy, but a gift,” confesses Brühl, relieved to play “at least for once a German historical figure without having to wear Nazi boots.”
At the beginning of the six chapters of Becoming Karl Lagerfeld, the designer is not exactly the successful man who has remained engraved in the collective memory. It is the year 1972 and the German, almost forty, is still unknown to the general public. He lives with his mother in Paris and makes a comfortable living as a fashion mercenary with no creative personality. Full of blocks, including sexual ones, he falls in love with Jacques de Bascher, a dandy from the city’s high society, played by Théodore Pellerin. Together with him, he finds the courage to confront his friend and rival Yves Saint Laurent (Arnaud Valois), the local idol with whom the couple forms a complex love trio under the gaze of Pierre Bergé (Alex Lutz), Saint’s partner and companion. Laurent.
That convulsive rise to glory, between parties as banal and colorful as they were glamorous, shows the man before the leader of the Lagerfeld empire, the icon who reinvented the identity of Chanel surrounded by women like Paloma Picasso, Loulou de la Falaise and Marlene Dietrich. When the designer arrived in France in the fifties, being German was frowned upon, so he invented that his father was Swedish. He was an outsider hungry enough to compete with the French god, Yves Saint Laurent. “That need to be passionate and human, which I didn’t always manage to be, was endearing to me. As he achieved his goals, Lagerfeld added more and more layers to his public image, to that shield with which he protected himself,” comments the actor. “My friends, whom I know very well and know when they are lying to me, liked the result, so for now I am satisfied.”
Brühl, who has managed to develop an enviable international career living much of his time in a country house in Mallorca, feels in part identified with the anachronism that Lagerfeld experienced. “He was a lonely man in a Paris of excess, in which everyone got lost in the night, drugs and sex. And, meanwhile, he tried to retire to a palace and be faithful to one man; “He wanted to make the fairy tales that he built in his mind come true,” explains the actor. The complicated and unstable love story with Jacques de Bascher helped him find that courage that he lacked, but it not only shows romance, but also manipulation and toxicity, says the Spanish-German.
After the initial six chapters, the German considers that there is still a lot to tell to complete the story and also the portrait of the man that Lagerfeld had invented for himself. So he wouldn’t mind resuming the project for a possible second season. And show Lagerfeld after love. De Bascher, with whom it is said that she never had sex, was one of the victims of the AIDS epidemic and died at the end of the eighties, at the age of 38, away from all eyes so that no one could witness her physical decline. The designer installed an extra bed in his hospital room to accompany him until the last day. A decade later, he launched a perfume named after him: Jako. “When they proposed the character to me, I was shockbut now I would like to delve deeper into him until I meet the Lagerfeld I met 20 years ago,” confesses the actor.
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