How Rising Star Julia Franz Richter Went From Nativity Plays to Starring in Two Berlinale Movies

Having a movie at the Berlin Film Festival is widely seen as a major success, a dream come true even. Julia Franz Richter (Rubikon, Peacock, Ghost Trail) first had that experience in 2020 as part of the cast of Christian Petzold’s romantic fantasy drama Undine. This year, the 34-year-old Austrian actress is back at the 75th edition of the Berlinale – and she is bringing not one but two films.

After attracting attention with various previous roles, Richter is the star of Welcome Home Baby, a psychological thriller from director Andreas Prochaska (The Dark Valley, Das Boot, Alex Rider) that opens Berlin’s Panorama sidebar on Thursday and explores such themes as identity and trauma. The actress plays Berlin emergency doctor Judith who inherits a house in rural Austria which she did not even know existed from the family that gave her away as a child. When she travels there with her husband to sell the property, her inscrutable aunt seems determined to keep her in the village. But the longer Judith stays, the more subconscious images and emotions come to the surface.

Film fans at the Berlinale can also catch Richter in a key supporting role in Johanna Moder’s Mother’s Baby, which world premieres in the festival’s competition lineup on Feb. 18. Starring Marie Leuenberger, Hans Löw, and Claes Bang, the film focuses on Julia (Leuenberger) who becomes pregnant after successful treatment at a fertility clinic. But the child’s birth soon puts a strain on her and her marriage. Richter portrays a midwife in the clinic run by a doctor played by Bang.

So what is it like having two films at the Berlinale? “It’s a bit surreal,” Richter tells THR. “Of course, it’s a huge recognition for the movies, the filmmakers, and the teams who worked on the films. Also, festivals do not take place in a political vacuum, but can always be a space for social questions, discourses, and perspectives. I’m looking forward to that, rather than the festivities.”

She recalls how as a kid she loved getting into different characters while playing with others before tipping a toe onto the stage. “My friends and I always participated in the Nativity play, which is weird, because I’m not a huge fan of the Church,” Richter shares. “But it was my first contact with performing. And then I studied Comparative Literature and really liked it because I enjoy working with text and storytelling. But I always felt the need for a more practical space where I can really embody somebody else.”

So, she focused on her acting studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Graz, Austria from 2012 until 2016. From 2016 to 2018, she was then a member of the ensemble at the Munich Volkstheater, where she appeared in such productions as Medea.

In 2020, Richter made headlines in Austria when she won the best actress award at the Austrian film festival Diagonale for her lead role in Günter Schwaiger’s 2019 drama Der Taucher, in which she played an 18-year-old whose close relationship with her mother gets challenged when the mother’s ex-partner reappears. Her work in Undine then convinced more people that the up-and-comer was a face to keep an eye on.

Last year, she appeared in two well-received movies, Jonathan Millet’s Ghost Trail with Adam Bessa, a thriller about Syrian exiles in France, and Bernhard Wenger’s Peacock with All Quiet on the Western Front actor Albrecht Schuch, about a young man who masters playing various roles for hire but struggles with just being himself. This year, she will be in the double Berlinale spotlight.

Initially, Richter didn’t really have any acting role models. “Now, I do,” she says, mentioning Sandra Hüller as someone “who I admire genuinely for her work and for how she chooses projects.”

How does she herself go about picking roles? “Sometimes it’s the character that I really want to play, and sometimes it’s the script,” Richter tells THR. “With Welcome Home Baby, it was both. I also really like to do genre. I’m curious about it because it has so much potential to tell stories in different, weird ways.”

One key appeal and challenge of portraying Judith in Welcome Home Baby was that she is “this character who is very clear and sharp at the beginning and then kind of deconstructs herself.” The role required a real tour de force given intense emotional — and, at times, physical — extremes. “There were scenes that were very intense and exhausting and particularly hard in a physical way,” Richter explains. “What was also very challenging was that the script calls for a lot of different states and conditions. So it was sometimes very hard to just jump right into a very extreme situation.” Luckily, Richter says she enjoys giving it her all.

That was also the case with Mother’s Baby where she got to play opposite Bang, among others. “I was very starstruck – in a good way,” Richter acknowledges. “I’m lucky to get to work with people who are so passionate about their work. I saw The Square and admired what he gave to that character. It was really nice working with him, and I think (our characters) have a special relationship in that film that is hopefully not so easy to decipher.”

Director Moder lauds Richter for bringing not only positive energy to the set but also elements to the character that she herself hadn’t even thought about. “Julia is incredible and absolutely amazing,” she tells THR. “And she designed this character in a way that was completely different from what I had imagined.”

Richter says she doesn’t follow a specific method for acting. “The characters are very different, and the way they talk is very different, so for me, it’s always about trying to get as close as possible to the character,” she tells THR. “There is a certain space between how a role was written, how the director imagined it, and me. This small space that I feel I can’t quite reach is maybe the most interesting. And this is where (things are) the most vulnerable.”

The actress prefers to come to the set “well-prepared,” while at the same time being ready for the various unknown and unexpected factors in filmmaking. “For me, it’s very important to stay open to those and try to be in the moment and be permeable for what is happening on set,” she explains. “Most of the character develops by working together with the other actors and the director. And if you’re lucky, and I have been very lucky, you can work with directors and colleagues who try to surprise you.”

Welcome Home Baby and Mother’s Baby have something in common beyond the word baby in their titles and Richter’s name in the credits. “I consider myself a person who is thinking a lot about how my work resonates with the world and vice versa. So I’m interested in stories that are connected to the world and society we live in,” Richter explains. “And in both movies, trauma is a big motive.”

Don’t pigeonhole the actress though! “I have had good opportunities with genre films, such as horror and science fiction,” including as the lead in Magdalena Lauritsch’s 2022 sci-fi thriller Rubikon, about the crew of a space station who, following a catastrophe on Earth, must decide whether to risk their lives or search for survivors or stay safe in the station’s “algae symbiosis system.”

But she also “really, really” admires “well-written comedy or satire.” How about musicals? “I was not a fan of musicals when I was younger but now I feel that they really can push the boundaries of cinema,” Richter shares. “And so, I would love to do a musical.”

The Austrian also has an eye on writing. “I came to acting through storytelling because as a kid I really loved to imagine strange characters and different worlds than the one that we live in, with different rules,” Richter says. “So, at the moment I’m working on two scripts, one with a friend of mine who’s an author, and the other one with a director. The work is at a very early stage, so I don’t know if anything will ever become of it, but if possible, I would love to go more in that direction.”

The one idea is more political. “It is about mining work from a feminist perspective, about extractivism and the question of belonging in a complex world,” Richter tells THR. “The other story is about a family who is going on a holiday together and their struggles unfolding through this experience.”

Whatever comes next, Richter wants to continue exploring different types of creative work and pushing herself in new directions, unafraid to step outside of her comfort zone.

For example, in TV, she had a leading role as an investigating police officer in the 2021 Austrian TV movie Vier (The Cursed) from Corsage writer and director Marie Kreutzer. Richter has also appeared in a dance performance, as well as in the music video for Austrian band Wanda’s song Jurassic Park. And she has been performing in the play humanistää!, which the New York Times has called “a breathtaking theatrical immersion in (Austrian author Ernst) Jandl’s playful linguistic cosmos.”

“I also have a music project (via the Franz Pop Collective) which is now on hold, but we performed together and did an EP,” with her singing, Richter says. “It was called Wuman on a Sofa. It was about examining self-imposed isolation as an example of resistance” in a growth- and productivity-focused world.

“I like to work in an interdisciplinary way,” Richter concludes. “And I really like to challenge myself. So, I am very happy to work in different fields with different kinds of people.”