Warning: Spoilers for the first two seasons of Dark
“Man is a strange creature,” recites Dietrich Hollinderbäumer, on the phone from Berlin. “All his actions are motivated by desire, his character forged by pain … he cannot free himself from eternal servitude to his fear. For as long as the storm rages within him, he cannot find peace. Not in life, not in death. And so he will do what he must, day in, day out, the pain his vessel, desire his compass.”
Science fiction does not always take itself seriously, but Dark really does. It debuted ominously in 2017, leading us into the twilight town of Winden, where a suicide and a teen’s disappearance were further benighting a community riddled with sadness and betrayal. Soon, time travel was involved. By the end of the first season, Dark had become a drama set in 2019, 1986, 1953 and 2052, its characters hopping from era to era in a looping battle between good and evil – but they were also forever trying to go back and fix their messy personal lives.
Dark hit upon a formula that attracted a fierce cult following across the world: intense emotion, couched in a plot so complex it required intense concentration among the audience. In the third and final season, which lands on Netflix on Saturday, a parallel world is added to the criss-crossing timelines.
“It’s even more complicated than the first two!” says Andreas Pietschmann, who plays The Stranger. He remembers wondering, when filming season one, whether Dark was too intricate. “People aren’t used to watching television that way. They’re used to leaving the room, grabbing a coffee, coming back and still understanding it. But obviously they want to be [challenged]. Dark really demands something from the viewer.”
“The more complex it gets the more fun it is,” agrees Louis Hofmann, who stars as the lovelorn teen outcast Jonas. “Our audience is just so ... ambitious. They want to know everything. They zoom into every [frame] and analyse it.”
Watching Dark means regularly referring to a diagram of the show’s family relationships, to keep up with its favourite trick of different characters turning out to be the same person at different ages. Halfway through season two, it emerged that Hofmann, Pietschmann and Hollinderbäumer all play the same guy: frantic doomsayer The Stranger and the enigmatic, disfigured villain Adam are older versions of Jonas.
“We decided not to get together too much to talk about it,” says Pietschmann. “It wouldn’t be helpful to try to imitate each other: how do you lift that cup? How do you say this word? The richness of the character comes from it being played by three actors.”
Hofmann credits the show’s casting department with choosing actors who are naturally plausible as the same person, particularly himself and Pietschmann. “Of course we look alike, but we became friends quickly because we are so alike in what we feel and how we think. And then things happened, like in the scene where I grab Martha’s face and in the scene where he grabs Martha’s face, we both close our eyes. It didn’t come from the director and we didn’t talk to one another, it just happened.”
Along with Lisa Vicari as Jonas’s love interest Martha – who in the final scene of season two was shot dead in front of Jonas by Adam (Jonas’s older self) but then rejoined the cast immediately when her alternative self from a parallel universe walked in – Hofmann has emerged from the ensemble as a central protagonist, the troubled soul who might just be important enough to save humanity. That has made Hofmann, who starred in the 2015 Danish-German movie Land of Mine but was otherwise previously little-known, the focus of the show’s fandom.
“The first few months after season one was released, I was overwhelmed by this amazing response,” he says. “In Berlin and all over the world, wherever I was, I was being recognised. And then there are all the messages, which are very warm and nice messages, but it’s just ... a lot. I have half a million followers on Instagram. It’s all very absurd.”
Of the three iterations of Jonas, Hofmann’s is the one who has to bear the weight of the show’s constantly high-pitched emotion: “You don’t want every scene, because something extraordinary happens, to have the same facial expressions as another scene where something unbelievable happens. So there was a bit of figuring out how to put the nuances in there. And it does affect your mood when everything is so intense.”
Angsty young Jonas, a scruffy small-town loser with a troubled family history who might nevertheless be humanity’s saviour if he can defy his own fate, embodies the show’s teen appeal. Many young adults want to avoid becoming clones of their elders, but Jonas has actually seen what the future holds if he fails to change it, because he has met the frazzled Stranger and the monstrous Adam. “It’s a generational story about whether you are like your parents, whether you imitate them, whether you want to act exactly opposite of how they were acting in their youth,” says Hofmann. “It’s also about free will, of course.”
Hofmann’s position at the centre of the story’s tangled threads also means he has to chew through the show’s most extreme dialogue, most notoriously in the season one scene where Jonas says: “Now I have another grandma, and she’s the principal of my school! Her husband, who’s fucking my mom, is looking for his son, who’s my father! A few days ago, I kissed my aunt!”
Hofmann laughs as the line’s quoted back to him. “The other day some Instagram page posted it as a clip, and there were people commenting saying: how weird must this feel for a person to watch without knowing the series? What’s happening to that character?! This is so fucked up!”
This year is, the three Jonases all agree, definitely the end, and not just because things can’t get any crazier. Writer Jantje Friese and director Baran bo Odar had always planned to make three seasons. “[That gave us an advantage] because when you look at Game of Thrones or Lost, they continue and continue then say OK, we want to stop, we have to figure out an ending, and then it’s all very abrupt and maybe not as good as it could have been if you’d thought about it earlier,” says Hofmann. “We always had the story as a whole in mind. Fans of Dark, they understand. It’s sad AF, but it’s the right thing to do.”
“I’m happy that the story is told now,” says Hollinderbäumer, “and that the next part I do as an actor, I will not sit in makeup for five hours.”
Hofmann, similarly, can look forward to future roles without Jonas’s trademark dirty face and noose-scarred neck, where he can make more use of his leading-man looks and perhaps an English accent that, in interview, sounds good enough for him to play English characters. “I’m trying! I want my accent to be perfect, so I don’t have to be narrowed down to [playing] a German.” Dark, however, will be a hard act to follow.
Dark is on Netflix from Saturday 27 June
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