André Schneider

At the age of twenty, he gave his stage debut in his hometown of Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, co-starring with Michael Demuth in the enormously successful musical "Zoff". One year later, he relocated to Berlin, and in 2001, he moved to London.

Both his first book, "Life is a Sexually Transmitted Disease", and the pop album "Lover's Space" came out in 2004, and after the release of Deed Poll (2004), which went on to become a cult favorite, André worked extensively in Great Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Austria, and Belgium. In Germany, he worked as a writer-actor on Ingo J. Biermann's ill-fated drama Glastage (2007) and did Der Mann im Keller (2008) with Nikolaus Firmkranz. The latter also became his directorial debut.

In 2006, André wrote, produced and starred in Half Past Ten (2008), based on a Marguerite Duras novel, directed by Sascha Bachmann and co-starring Kerstin Linnartz. Subsequently, he was cast in a string of (mostly unreleased) Spanish student films before he eventually decided to take a hiatus from the movies for almost two years, focusing on his theatre work instead.

Alex und der Löwe (2010), a gay romantic comedy with Marcel Schlutt, Sascia Haj, and Udo Lutz, was André's first film as a writer-producer-actor in almost three years. He played the title role of Alex, a 30-year-old Berlin-based man who clumsily stumbles from one relationship to the next. The movie fared surprisingly well, and so André revived his part in what was little more than a cameo in its highly successful, multi-award winning successor, Men to Kiss (2012). Still, working in droll German comedies left him dissatisfied and unhappy. "It was a dead-end career for me, I was desperate for new challenges," he later recalled.