Ken Duken

Ken Duken is a German actor and director known for his extensive work across film and television productions. He began his career performing on stage before transitioning to screen acting and expanding his creative pursuits behind the camera as a director and producer.

Duken is the third child of film and stage actress Christina Loeb and a doctor father. Although he did not attend drama school, he took courses in drama, including training under James Reynold. Early in his acting career, Duken performed in various stage plays, including Der Besuch der alten Dame, Das Haus in Montevideo, and several Shakespeare plays. He made his film debut in 1997 with a small role in the television crime film Blutiger Ernst, performing alongside Nadja Uhl and Daniel Brühl.

His first major movie role came in 1999 alongside Franka Potente and Heiner Lauterbach in Friedemann Fromm's Paradise Mall. That same year, Duken starred as Mark, a young wheelchair user, in Miguel Alexandre's drama Gran Paradiso, completing three months of wheelchair training for the role; the drama was nominated for the German Film Award. Beginning in 2002, Duken joined the core cast of the long-running ZDF police drama series Night Shift, created by Lars Becker, portraying young Commissioner Teddy Schrader.

Throughout the 2000s, Duken took on diverse screen roles. He appeared in Curt Faudon's Deadly Diversion in 2003 and in Buket Alakus's award-winning tragicomedy Offside in 2005. His screen credits also include portraying a Communist spy in Karol: A Man Who Became Pope and Anatol Kuragin in Robert Dornhelm's adaptation of War and Peace, filmed in Russia and Lithuania in 2006. In late 2007, he played war returnee Ben Winter in the SWR teleplay Welcome Home.

In 2003, Duken co-founded the production company Grand Hôtel Pictures alongside Bernd Katzmarczyk and Norbert Kneissl. He directed and starred in the company's first project, From another point of view, alongside his wife Marisa Leonie Bach and Dominique Pinon. He also directed music videos for artists such as Oomph! and the rapper Curse, produced the 2009 psycho-thriller Distance, and later directed the 2015 movie Berlin Falling.

Duken featured in several notable international projects, playing Gestapo officer Siegfried Fehmer in the 2008 film Max Manus. This role prepared him for Quentin Tarantino's 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, where he played a German soldier in chapter four with a Mata Hari card on his forehead. In 2009, he played Ralf in Zweiohrküken. In 2011, he portrayed commander Werner Hartenstein in the BBC television drama The Sinking of the Laconia, starred in the television movie Carl & Bertha, and appeared in Chalet Girl. In 2021, he starred in Algiers Confidential.

Duken has been married to German actress Marisa Leonie Bach, a descendant of composer Johann Sebastian Bach, since October 2000. The couple has a son named Viggo, born in October 2009.