Christoph Waltz urgently needs a management consultant

There are actors who play a character with such stamina that at some point you can't help but assume that there's a certain match in character. Between guy and human.

And who – especially when they are beginning to see the fall of their careers in sight – wish that some kind of acting consultant would take them aside and advise them to do something completely different for four or five films. To remain unpredictable. To avoid the impression that you don't really have to try that hard when you're an actor.

Let's take Christoph Waltz. Unless some acting consultant takes care of him soon, he will go down in film history as the Cheshire Cat. It appears in Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland". She is characterized by a particularly nasty smile, which is still there even when the cat is long gone. And then she just has to put her clothes back on, the cat.

Christoph Waltz is particularly good at it. The nasty, almost cat-like smile, one with a lot of teeth, you can also call it sardonic. The word malicious was probably invented for this. It sticks in your head even after Waltz has long since disappeared from the screen. At the next, no, at every opportunity he pulls it open again.

In the past, Simone Bär would have been thrown at him as an acting company consultant, the castress who once placed him as the devilishly elegant Jew hunter Hans Landa in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds", the original character he has played in variations ever since. Unfortunately, Simone Bär is no longer alive.

And so Christoph Waltz just keeps doing what he – admittedly – ​​does best. Unfortunately, in the meantime he is also doing everything to – let's stick to management consultant talk – suggest a synergy effect between himself and his characters.

Waltz brings the latest sardonic grin to the Amazon series The Consultant. There he is Regus Patof. One day he is standing – coat, suit, tie, his back as straight as if he had a cane where others have a spine – in the company headquarters of the computer games startup CompWare.

Its childlike king and genius had just been shot dead by an apparently computer game-bewildered child. The company headquarters looks the way company headquarters look today, a bit of a ball pool, a bit of a children's birthday party, screens, pastel-colored, snugly rounded seating areas.

Regus enters him like an alien. Like an Elon Musk by other means. The shop is his now. He has no idea about computer games. Nor does he have to. His sole purpose - that's his business model, it turns out - is to find out what all the young people, the millennials on the screens and at CompWare, are willing to do for their careers.

How far they will go, how quickly they will throw away their dignity, their values. You don't have to be a prophet: they do it quickly.

You have to stream the series. Streaming is one of those cultural techniques that might never have made it this far if it weren't for millennials. “Millennials” refers to those born between 1981 and 1998 among the inflationary number of generations since the turn of the millennium.

Christoph Waltz doesn't care. He is executive producing the eight-part series based on a tale by cozy horror expert Barry Little. To assume that Regus Patof is already himself in a way suggests what he said in an interview with "WELT" as a strange kind of flanking advertising measure for "The Consultant".

He said he was always amazed at "how adjusted, obedient and docile this generation is". Einstein once said, "To be an impeccable member of a flock of sheep, one must first be a sheep."

He took Berlin-Mitte, where Waltz has his main residence, as the epicenter of being sheep, so to speak: “Everyone there is ultra-cool too, everyone is the same. They are like a herd. Ergo, they are sheep too. If you speak to them, they even talk like sheep. Sorry for generalizing like this. Certainly there will also be individuals among them who are completely different. And if you take out one of these sheep and shear it, then you will surely recognize the person underneath. But not before.”

CompWare, says the 66-year-old, who has probably never had a commercial employment relationship in his life, pars pro toto, so to speak, of the general working day of all around forty-year-olds. “The Consultant,” Waltz says, “is a very astute and accurate observation of what is happening within this generation of young workers. That, to me, is the beauty of this story – it reflects the essence of working millennials.”

The sheep analogy that Waltz uses is, of course, fatally reminiscent of the metaphor used by right-wing circles ("sleep sheep"), which even millennial critics have to raise to the barricades in defense of this generation. In order to somehow save his cause, Waltz could have pointed out the almost timeless character of this story. On the fact that when a new, proto-fascist company regime comes in, employees always have the unpleasant but all too human trait of being obedient to authorities and ignoring moral losses to protect themselves and their careers. That what happens in The Consultant happens always and everywhere and in every generation. Because it's a basic human constant. From the rationalization cases of the 1970s to Elon Musk's Twitter today. But Waltz lacks any hint of historical empiricism. Quite apart from the lack of empathy for the supposed sleeping sheep of Berlin-Mitte.

As a solid, not very funny chamber play, “The Consultant” looks into the abysses of modern capitalism. Quotations from the history of soul selling are not lacking. A game of Faust is played with CompWare. With Patof as Mephisto. But wait, that's lagging. Mephisto was once a black poodle. “The Consultant” is more of a neon-colored sheep.