‘The Alienist’: Daniel Brühl Talks Playing Laszlo Kreizler On The TNT Series

Playing Dr. Laszlo Kreizler on TNT’s “The Alienist” was a dream come true for Daniel Brühl.

In a recent interview with Syfy Wire, the 39-year-old German-Spanish actor said that it was an “absolute dream and a huge privilege” to portray the role of Kreizler, a psychologist who teams up with newspaper illustrator John Moore (Luke Evans), police commissioner secretary Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning), and Jewish twin detectives Marcus (Douglas Smith) and Lucius Isaacson (Matthew Shear) to investigate a series of gruesome murders of boy sex workers in 1896 New York City.

“Everything about it I absolutely loved and embraced,” Brühl said of his role as Kreizler. “It gave me the opportunity to dive into this fascinating universe and period in time. And Dr. Laszlo Kreizler is a very multilayered, twisted character. He’s bright and smart on the one hand, and then incredibly vulnerable and emotional on the other.”

Brühl also told Den of Geek in a separate interview that he finds it interesting to play a psychologist back in those days. “They didn’t do instructive analysis which nowadays everyone does,” Brühl said of the psychologists in the 19th century. “So Kreizler needs to deal with his personal problems, pressures and demons by himself and that puts him very often in a state of a huge vulnerability and emotional fragility. That contrast of being such a determined and smart psychologist and analyzing everyone as well as being sensitive to everything around him appeals to me.”

Brühl’s love for Caleb Carr’s novel “The Alienist,” on which the TV series was based, was also a deciding factor when the actor signed on for the role. “The second I started reading the book, I was mesmerized and fascinated,” Brühl told Collider when asked what drew him to the series. “I felt like a 12-year-old with a torchlight under the blankets. I couldn’t stop reading it. I think I read it in a day or two. It was the combination of it being a gripping psychological thriller with very compelling characters. It is also a fascinating history lesson about New York, at the time. … You get to learn about the politics, and the corruption within the police department, at that time, and there’s the combination of having real characters, and then the fictional characters.”

“The Alienist” airs Mondays at 9 p.m. EST on TNT.