Following a critically-lauded silver screen debut in 2022’s quadruple Oscar-winning WWI drama All Quiet on the Western Front, Felix Kammerer now wades into Hollywood’s stranger, darker currents with a ticket to Guillermo del Toro’s fantastically macabre Frankenstein. It is, in every sense, an electrifying run for an actor coming fully into the gravity of it all.

The first conversation between Austrian actor Felix Kammerer and Mexican director Guillermo del Toro wasn’t in an agent’s office, a well-connected indie friend’s living room, or on a red carpet. Instead, it unravelled in a public loo. It was at least one with some prestige – the toilets of LA’s The Dolby Theatre, to be specific, on the venue’s biggest night of the year: the Oscars. In 2023, the year following his onscreen debut in Edward Berger’s anti-war drama All Quiet on the Western Front, the film swept awards season, becoming one of the year’s most talked-about productions. Deservedly, it catapulted its lead Kammerer – a then-27-year-old best known previously for his work in Viennese theatre – into the ranks of Hollywood’s most compelling nascent leading men.

“I [just remember] suddenly feeling a huge hand grabbing me by the shoulder, turning me around, and it’s Guillermo del Toro,” Kammerer recalls with a grin. “He asks me, ‘So, kid, when are we going to work together?’ I thought that someone had put something in my drink. But I told him, ‘You are Guillermo del Toro. You tell me. It’s not on me to decide.’  And he said, ‘All right, I’ll reach out to you.’” 

Berger’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same name picked up four golden statuettes that evening, including Best International Feature Film. Del Toro also took home a gong (Best Animated Feature Film for Pinocchio) and Kammerer’s phone number in his pocket. But what does one do with the knowledge that you’re in the sights of one of modern cinema’s most visionary directors? 

“I didn’t say anything [to anyone],” Kammerer laughs. “I met so many people [that night] that I admire, and I was so stunned that they were really lovely. My biggest fear was that I would meet all those people that I look up to, and they would turn out to be arrogant and just unlikable. Turns out, they are all really great people. I met Colin Farrell, who has been my idol since forever, and he basically jumped on me from behind, hugged me, and said, ‘Finally, we meet!’ With those dreamy moments, where you just can’t comprehend what’s happening, you just let them happen. So I didn’t tell anyone… until I did, because I was so excited.”

Perhaps Kammerer’s initial disbelief is merely down to the fickle nature of networking itself. From office chattering to the Oscars, the story is repeated: plenty of talking, plenty of promises and more often than not, very little follow-through.“Very often, it just goes away,” Kammerer agrees. “But, somehow, two weeks later, I got a phone call, and it’s my agent, who says, ‘Guillermo wants to talk to you.’ We had a talk, and he sent me a script. He told me, ‘Read it. If you love it, let’s work together.’ Four months later, we’re on set in Toronto shooting Frankenstein.”

When we speak on a grey Viennese morning in late September, we’re less than two months away from the film’s Netflix premiere on 7 November, following a limited theatrical run in the weeks prior. Yet if Kammerer feels any pre-release jitters, they don’t show. Fresh from a walk in the rain with his young daughter, he sounds calm and centred – a man with his feet firmly on the ground, even as the world around him begins to rumble again.

“[Vienna] was voted the most liveable city for the last 12 years in a row, and I can see why,” he tells me, affirming his bonds with his hometown. “It’s very safe. It’s quite green. It is a big city, but it feels like a village. The only problem is it gets a bit too cosy from time to time, so you need to know when you’re going to leave again or, at some point, you just tend to fall asleep.” 

Work, it seems, has been keeping him alert. He’s fresh from his first Venice Film Festival, with castmates Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Oscar Isaac, at which Frankenstein was unveiled to critics and film aficionados who flocked to the floating city for a first glimpse at the forthcoming awards season’s hopefuls. “[Venice Film Festival] is so crazy,” he laughs.“Everything you get with awards or festivals – the cars queuing, photoshoots, press – you have all the same things but on boats. Seeing 50 boats queued up is really, really funny. It’s a bit like a ride in a theme park.”

Since the announcement that the Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water director would be taking on Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel in October 2023, expectations were soaring. And despite the fact that, at the time of our interview, details around the film are being kept tightly under wraps, del Toro’s signature dark, hellish artistry is palpable from the film’s trailers. “‘It’s pretty on the nose for Guillermo. Obviously, he should do Frankenstein,” Kammerer recalls thinking after his agent’s call. “So I asked, ‘Do you know what the part is?’ And [they] said, ‘Um, the part’s called William.’ I went back to the novel and found William, but he’s a five-year-old boy who’s mentioned twice in a letter and then dies. I was thinking, ‘Are they going to use CGI and make me five years old? Okay. Give me those two sentences and make me five years old – I’ll do anything for Guillermo.’”

Kammerer’s boyish face could make the special effects team’s job easier. But, thankfully, it was a grown-up iteration of William, in human form, that was bound for the screen. “I found out, after reading the script, that Guillermo had turned William into a 30-year-old opponent to his brother [Victor Frankenstein, played by Oscar Isaac]. William is the antagonist, so you have these two sides – the weird, messy, emotional, uncomfortable Victor, who’s chasing his dreams, and William, who’s modest, calm, influential and successful. Everyone loves him; no one loves Victor,” he laughs.

Taking on a character that was barely scripted in traditional adaptations could prove a gamble. But when the director sitting next to you, and allowing you into their creative process, is someone you admire to such an extent, the challenge pays off. “I had some ideas, [Guillermo] had some ideas, and we just brought it together,” he says. “We talked a lot about family and about brothers, as I’m an only child, and he has siblings. It was a crazy ride to talk to Guillermo about himself, about myself and combine all that into a character. A great lesson of trust.” 

Despite being a relatively fresh face in the industry, Kammerer isn’t a stranger to the fixtures of culture and acclaim. Be that from the success of All Quiet – as the cast nicknamed the film – a ride that took him around the globe to some of the biggest award ceremonies in the industry, or due to his upbringing surrounded by art, as the only son of two renowned Austrian opera singers. “Growing up, my mother was travelling a lot, and my father was part of the opera company in Vienna,” he remembers. “I grew up with travelling, music and stage. So I was really born into this job, and I didn’t know anything else until I made my own friends in school.”

The theatre was Kammerer’s backyard, where he got to experience first-hand the way seeds of magic would be sown in a show’s creation, and, later, experienced by audiences when the curtain rose. “I was somehow fascinated, in a weird way, by the stage and the…,” he looks for the right word, “forgery, that you see behind the curtain. As a little boy, I saw how fake blood was put on a face and how costumes were put on. I remember thinking, ‘I can see the people down there, and they believe what’s happening up there, but I see both sides.’”

Observing the blurring of reality and fiction so routinely meant that assimilating instincts for his craft simply became part of his daily reality. “When I was in high school, I realised, ‘Oh, I think you can study [acting].’ Which still sounds weird to me. I can’t help but ask why. Of course, now I know it’s a profession, and there are a lot of technical parts [of the] craft. But it feels weird to have something in your mind, like acting, that seems so intuitive and emotional and untouchable and, suddenly, someone tells you, ‘Yeah, you can go to school, and they will teach you how to do that’.”

However, by the age of 20, he was enrolled at the reputable Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, a place he considers his second home, before moving back to Vienna to work with dramaturge Sabrina Zwarch at the city’s Burgtheater in 2019. “I had no ambition of starting a career in film until All Quiet,” he remembers. However, Zwarch insisted that her husband, Malte Grunert, the film’s producer, at the time in the thick of its casting process, come to watch Kammerer in one of his earliest plays with the company. After the show, “[Malte] said, ‘Maybe he is the right guy for this role in All Quiet,’” Kammerer recalls.

One can only look at the film’s Oscar tally to know he was on the money. And the switch to practising his craft in front of the camera was a move that felt right for Kammerer, too. By the time he’d moved onto his subsequent project – a return to the territory of wartime literary adaptations in Shawn Levy’s 2023 miniseries All The Light We Cannot See – he’d decisively caught the bug. “That was a character I really loved,” he enthuses, “because it was so weird and dark.” Survival thriller Eden followed in 2024, a production filmed in Australia through loopholes of the SAG-AFTRA strike, with a stellar cast encompassing Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Sydney Sweeney, Ana de Armas and his All Quiet castmate Daniel Brühl, “a very, very good friend of mine,” Kammerer smiles, “with whom I’m going to do my next project.” 

Break is something of an All Quiet reunion. Brühl returns to the director’s chair, following his 2021 debut Next Door, and Kammerer finds his way back to the leading man spot, as he portrays tennis player Gottfried von Cramm, the multi-Grand Slam champion imprisoned by the Nazi regime for homosexuality in 1938. Grunert is also on board as producer.  

The excitement of having a close friend directing his work is palpable from Kammerer and begs the question of whether stepping behind the camera is something he’d consider himself. “I think I’d be a better DOP,” he chuckles. “I’m better with pictures and images and composition of light. I can direct myself, but if I had to direct seven people at once, run the set, make sure the producer’s happy and the cast is too – which is basically impossible – I’d die. So I’ll stick to DOP and just make it look exciting.”

Before we part ways, there’s one topic left on my notepad to be discussed. It’s September, and we’re in the heat of fashion’s most talked-about season in recent times as the first collections are debuted following a Tetris-like reconfiguration of the industry’s top jobs caused by a series of high-profile creative director moves. Kammerer, himself, has figured in this moment in history as one of the faces to grace the final Loewe campaign by Jonathan Anderson, crafted before the designer’s monumental transfer to Dior in April. “That was one of the most beautiful connections brought to me [recently],” Kammerer says. “I’m a huge fashion fan.” From Venice to the cover of Man About Town, and the press tour for Frankenstein, the actor is stepping into the industry’s glare once more, hand in hand with the Spanish house. 

However, his interest in fashion extends far beyond first-rate leather craftsmanship and avant-garde accessories. “I’m very interested in exploring different forms of expression, through textiles, fabrics and garments. During COVID, I did an online course on fashion design from MoMA in New York, and I really started getting into it. To get in touch with Loewe and have that collaboration was a dream come true – they’re truly one of my favourite, favourite brands.” And how does modelling compare to acting? “That was completely unknown territory. I’d never done anything like it before. You can’t hide behind a character because it’s you. It was one of the most nerve-racking experiences I’ve had so far,” he laughs.“But I love it. And to be part of Jonathan’s final campaign for Loewe – that’s a little badge I’ll carry on my heart.”