Jonas Nay is a German actor and musician known for starring as Martin Rauch in Deutschland 83, the first German-language TV series shown on American television, and its sequels, Deutschland 86 and Deutschland 89.
Early life
Jonas Nay was born in Lübeck in 1990, days before the reunification of Germany. An active boy, he rarely watched television growing up preferring to spend his leisure time on his interests of sport and music. He received his secondary education at the Johanneum zu Lübeck, a Gymnasium with a music specialty, where he also played in the school's band.
Career
Because of his interest in the theatre, Nay responded to a newspaper advert looking for actors in 2004 and successively auditioned for a part in the German children's seriesVier gegen Z on German TV stationNDR. In the first two seasons of the television series, Nay portrayed character Otti Sörensen while using the stage nameJonas Friedebom. In the following years, he played minor roles in several television productions on German television stationsARD and ZDF. After finishing school, Nay took the lead role in the TV series Home Video, a drama about a young boy bullied by his classmates, who publish an intimate video of him. The production was awarded Best TV film at the 2011 German Television Awards. Nay himself received a German Television Award, as well as a 2012 Grimme-Preis Award, for his role. This work was followed by other leading roles in TV films. In 2012, Nay had a role as Hamburg investigator Cenk Batu in Tatort: , about a disturbed serial killer who is killed by his mother in the heat of the moment. For his role as the son of a schizophrenic in the 2013 film Hirngespinster, he was awarded the Bavarian Film Award in 2013 as "Best Newcomer." Nay opted for Zivildienst, rather than military service, working with people with disabilities; he went on to look at film scoring. He founded the band Concerted with other students at the Johanneum he had attended in his adolescence, in which he sang, played guitar and piano, and wrote the lyrics. The band worked on music for the Stephan Rick film The Good Neighbour in January 2013. The result was the forming of the new band Northern Lights. In 2015, Nay starred as Martin Rauch, an East German spy, in the Cold War thriller Deutschland 83, the first German-language TV series shown on American television, and later its 2018 sequel, Deutschland 86. He reached a certain level of international notoriety for this role being interviewed by multiple media outlets in the United Kingdom and United states. The third series, Deutschland 89, will air in 2020. Nay sings and plays the keyboard for the band Pudeldame.
