Grandson of anti-Hitler plotter to appear in Tom Cruise film
The grandson of a German anti-Nazi hero, who’s played by Tom Cruise in a film being shot near Berlin, has been given a cameo role in the movie.
Cruise, 45, is playing Claus Schenk Count von Stauffenberg, who was executed in 1944 after a failed bid to kill Adolf Hitler. Philipp von Schulthess, 34, a son of Stauffenberg’s youngest daughter Konstanze, will play a military officer in the film “Valkyrie,” according to Petra Schwuchow from the LimeLight PR agency, which is representing the film in Berlin.
“The grandson has been given a small role as an adjutant,” Schwuchow said in a telephone interview.
Germany’s Bild newspaper hailed Schulthess’s decision to join the production as “a sensation,” after Stauffenberg’s eldest son, Berthold Count von Stauffenberg, 72, expressed anger over Cruise’s membership in the Church of Scientology.
“I don’t like the idea of a Scientology member playing my father,” Berthold Count von Stauffenberg said in an interview with the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper on June 22. “I’m afraid only awful kitsch will come out of it.”
Schulthess is a Swiss-based theater actor who studied at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Bild said.
Count Stauffenberg was executed by firing squad after a bomb he planted in Hitler’s “Wolf’s Lair” headquarters in former East Prussia on July 20, 1944, narrowly missed killing the Nazi leader. Stauffenberg led a plot by German officers to assassinate Hitler.
German politicians have also expressed concern over a Scientology member playing one of the country’s most iconic figures of the 20th century. Scientology has a “totalitarian structure,” says a report posted on the Web site of the German embassy to the United States.
Filming began last week outside Berlin, where a mock-up of the Wolf’s Lair has been built in a forest.