I imagine I’m not alone in citing Blade as my introduction to Udo Kier, the gentlemanly German character actor, famous as much for his well-heeled mien as his reputation as a legend of cult cinema. None of that meant anything to me in 1998; I was 14. I had no idea who Kier was until Stephen Norrington adapted Marvel Comics’ vampire hunting antihero into a Wesley Snipes vehicle — which put me roughly several thousand miles away from the films of Paul Morrissey, Walerian Borowczyk, and Werner Herzog, which I eventually discovered for myself in high school and college. In the intervening years, Kier was, in my mind, just Gitano Dragonetti. (And Ralfi from Johnny Mnemonic, too.)
In Blade, Kier immediately struck my curiosity, a man measured in equal parts manners and menace. At his most courteous, Gitano cuts a more ominous figure than Stephen Dorff’s upstart Deacon Frost, a “move fast and break things” type with designs for world conquest. Frost’s recklessness makes him a hazard; Gitano’s easy placidity makes him terrifying. Nonetheless, the humming calm Kier expresses in the role drew me, and to this day draws me, to him, under the likely misguided assumption that I’d be safer with him than with Frost. (Even a polite vampire is still a vampire.) What I found years later, as I made my way to the rest of Kier’s filmography, is that the balance he strikes in Blade between invitation and intimidation is crucial to much of his work.
So it’s fitting that, several months after his passing in November 2025, three of his final roles collectively demonstrate the connective tissue that links together his incongruities as a performer: his irresistible charm, and his minacity. Few actors, if any, could portray Adolf Hitler (or is he?) as wolf living as a lamb, the task given him in Leon Prudovsky’s My Neighbor Adolf; Kier makes the contrast look shockingly natural. In his brief part in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s exquisite The Secret Agent, his character, Hans, is mistaken as a Nazi, decamped from Europe to hide away in Brazil, and he reacts to the quite possibly intentional confusion in aggrievement; meanwhile, in Amanda Kramer’s By Design, he plays a Aldo Fabbri, a befuddled high-end furniture designer, who correctly surmises that something is “off” with a chair of his making, unaware that it’s swapped essences with Camille (Juliette Lewis).
By Design affords viewers just a slim window of time for Kier to leave an impression. In mere minutes, he does. First, he’s puzzled and perhaps a little intrigued; it’s his chair, no doubt, but at the same time it repulses him. Before long, Kramer swaps to a chair’s-eye view of Aldo yelling at the camera. The film is every bit as surreal as “woman exchanges souls with an admittedly very handsome chair” suggests, but the emotional rollercoaster Kier rides in his scene takes Kramer’s odd abstractions to their peak. Who lets a chair of all things upset them? Only its maker, assuming they have a latent histrionic streak.
Like Kramer, Mendonça Filho wisely chooses his moment for deploying Kier. The Secret Agent is very much in keeping with the Brazilian master’s predilections. He likes the side characters in his ensembles, passersby meant to fill out the world that Mendonça Filho builds around his leads. Here, it’s Wagner Moura’s man with two names. Kier's Hans is just a tailor trying to live after the Holocaust swallowed up his previous life and devastated his home country. All the same, Mendonça Filho gravitates to Hans, as anyone directing Kier would — though in The Secret Agent, pulling focus to Kier has a “moth to the flame” effect on the material. Any Jewish Holocaust survivor would take umbrage with being labeled a Nazi, whether in jest or especially in earnest. Hans’ reaction to the corrupt police chief Euclides (Robério Diógenes) when he makes his derogatory remark is a violent stew: he is outraged, disgusted, and most of all wounded, and in that combination of sensations, we both feel for him and even fear him — not for ourselves, not even for Euclides, but for what might happen if Hans lashes out, as he so rightly deserves the freedom to do.
Such is the power of Kier’s charisma. In a moment in time, an innocent, harmless man flips a switch and transforms into a dangerous one. Prudovsky capitalizes on this quality in My Neighbor Adolf, in which that same switch is toggled repeatedly throughout. Kier plays German eccentric Hermann Herzog, who purchases the house next door to Marek Polsky (David Hayman), a chess master and a Holocaust survivor like Hans. Marek, who had an up close encounter with Hitler in 1933, immediately clocks Hermann as the late Führer as soon as he moves in. It should be impossible. Eventually the truth is revealed: it is impossible. Spoiler alert: It turns out that Hermann is one of Hitler’s body doubles, who over the years has unsurprisingly grown weary of his burden. This is a man existing in a constant state of lament, fated to remain on the run and hold court with Hitler fanboys — or, put in clearer terms, Nazi pricks — until the end of his days.
Kier bristles in the role. He is angry; he has been robbed of free will by a regime that, at the time in which My Neighbor Adolf is set, no longer exists and is doomed to cosplay as a man he despises. He is grieving; he can’t make his own choices and, everywhere he goes, fears recognition as one of the most vile creatures humanity has produced. This is no way to live. If Marek is at first a nuisance, he gradually becomes the first friend Hermann has had in years — a thing of beauty as played by Hayman and Kier. It’s up to Kier, though, to set the terms of their relationship’s development, which means he must play a reflection of Hitler both to keep up appearances and to ward away Marek, as much for Hermann’s good as for Marek’s. Buying Kier as Hitler is easy — not because he’s German (though he’s from Cologne, where Hitler was from Braunau am Inn), but because he’s ferocious. We all have had neighbors from Hell. Not many of us get to claim we’ve had a neighbor from the Berghof.
We live in an era of optics, where art is put under such scrutiny that submitting to play a man like Hitler might be seen by some as a party foul. There are more flattering places where Kier’s career could have been cut off. But My Neighbor Adolf (which, in fairness, was first commercially released in Israel in 2023; in terms of production schedules, Kier’s final film role is The Secret Agent) is a wonderful showcase for what Kier could do when cast as the heavy. By Design and The Secret Agent capture his soul as an artist in brief. He made eccentricity enchanting and generated empathy in indignance. But My Neighbor Adolf caps off his unmatched talent for making the abominable alluring — even when the monster isn’t as monstrous as they seem.
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