Thomas Gottschalk’s children are grown, but the moderator seems to be quite well informed about the media consumption of the younger generation. However, what he sees on YouTube and other channels regularly makes him despair.
The moderator Thomas Gottschalk is not a fan of the young internet generation. “I have to be careful not to waste all my time insulting any reality stars or YouTube influencers because I don’t believe in them,” he said in an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung. “That’s the big danger I’m in right now, that I’m constantly thinking, ‘Are you really serious?’
At the beginning of his career, he himself went through the “hard school of entertainment” and, for example, advertised the zigzag sewing machine for the Hertie department store chain. Just like his fellow actor Mike Krüger from the “Supernasen” films, who tinkered through the villages with his guitar case. “This hard school connects, and that’s what the reality idiots lack today.”
The younger generation is also “so soft-boiled and so anxious about success. They’re under so much pressure. I’m sorry.” He has always talked his head and neck on the radio and on television because he doesn’t care what other people think of him. But: “All these people with five million followers between the ages of nine and eleven, you notice every time they open their mouths that they are thinking of all their five million followers and just don’t want to do anything wrong.”
Gottschalk can currently be heard in the animated comedy “Minions – in search of the mini-boss” as the voice of the villain “Wilder Knucklecracker” in the cinema. During the dubbing, he showed something that wasn’t usually his style: a “certain humility” towards the director. “I don’t tend to say the same sentence twice,” says Gottschalk. He is very happy that the audience still wants to see and hear him: “If you can grow old in this profession, it’s a great honor. I don’t need managers and bodyguards to keep people away from me. For a photo there’s always time.”
