Matthew Beard & Juergen Maurer Talk 'Vienna Blood's Accidental Timeliness

Before the season premiere for Vienna Blood’s fourth and likely final season, lead actors Matthew Beard (Dr. Max Liebermann) and Juergen Maurer (Inspector Oskar Rheinhardt) spent about an hour thoughtfully answering press questions about their characters’ arcs, the series' distressingly timely historical resonances, and the joy it brings both artists and viewers when all of the little details of making television add up to a fully realized world. 

(In case you missed it, we also covered part of their joint interview at the midway point of this season.)

Both actors quickly highlighted the thematic and visual richness brought to Vienna Blood by its geographical and historical settings. A series showcasing the Austro-Hungarian empire’s capital city in the years just before The Great War is a nearly unique viewing experience for American audiences. Through its relationship with Walter Presents, PBS offers many high-appeal, high-quality historical dramas in languages other than English, set during periods more Eurocentrically focused than the post-World War II era. Seaside Hotel (in Danish) and Professor T (in Flemish) have found enthusiastic, deeply invested viewerships in the U.S. However, thanks to being shot in English, Vienna Blood offers an easier sell for viewers who may shy away from subtitled shows. 

With the fourth season being set in 1909, the contrasts of the period have never been in sharper relief. Maurer highlights Vienna’s beauty and vital role in the fine and decorative arts of the period, animatedly highlighting how painters like Klimt and Schiele, musicians like Mahler, and fashion designers doing away with corsets “were freeing their minds.” These innovations led to “the most interesting thirty years…how Vienna changed from being a fortified, stinking dump to a glorious imperial wonderland” before the cataclysm of the First World War.  

At the same time, the thicket of Viennese and imperial politics has never been more difficult for Oskar and Max to navigate. Intense nationalism and fiery rhetoric are increasingly the norm, and Beard notes that those issues have intensified since the first season, set in 1906. The historical resonances have “become more and more relevant…it’s worth telling those stories and showing this bit of history.” 

Alluding to the Liebermann family’s unusual position in Vienna as successful, wealthy business owners who are also foreign Jews, Beard believes “it’d be irresponsible not to at least touch on” how the unsettled times “would affect their lives in Vienna.” The Liebermanns have had to endure both subtle and overt anti-semitism each season, culminating in a sad, quiet moment in the fourth season’s finale, where Max’s mother Rachel (Amelia Bullmore) suggests to Mendel that it might be time for them to close up shop and return to England. Beard concludes that paradoxically, the disturbing subject matter from 1909 is so resonant now that the material was “more accessible to play, and to tap into, because unfortunately, that fear is with us now, as well.” 

After the midseason cliffhanger that left a comatose Max clinging to life following being shot by a gunman whose rifle featured a brand-new technology, the silencer, Maurer and Beard’s scenes together took place in Oskar’s mind palace, a set of rooms created and filled with his memories of prior cases he and Max had worked on. The change put Oskar squarely in the spotlight, and Maurer suggests it was a bit of a coping mechanism. For his friends and family, Max’s survival is not assured, and Oskar’s mind “helps itself with creating a dialogue” between the dream team. Maurer describes “the trick he’s doing to himself” as “the more beautiful way [to have these conversations], to imagine his friend in a dream, kind of on a stage.”

Beard, who, with Conleth Hill, was also shooting Moonflower Murders in Dublin concurrently with Vienna Blood, concurs, highlighting the visual novelty of the pair’s dreamworld conversations. The camera team “were allowed to experiment a bit with it,” giving them room to try new things “in terms of set design and lighting.” The lone downside Beard identified was that the “inside of Oskar’s head turned out to be a room in the middle of a heatwave in Vienna…we were all quite delirious.” 

In addition to those delights and challenges, the summer 2024 shoot provided the chance to work with a full-season villain, Helena Riegers, played by Leonie Benesch (Around The World in 80 Days). The accomplished young businesswoman runs the lavish, highly successful casino Riegers Palace, also the hub for agents and secrets Mephisto orchestrates. The final act reveals that Helena herself is Mephisto, motivated as much by revenge as by political and financial profit, which is particularly chilling, giving Benesch a moment to play the very slightly restrained mania of a criminal who knows she’s won. The public and political establishment believe Oskar has saved the empire by identifying Serbian nationalist Lazar Kiss as Mephisto; however, Helena’s revelation of her true identity highlights just where the balance of power lies. 

As the ruthlessly selfish steward of Vienna’s darkest secrets and blackmail material, she’ll easily be able to continue manipulating the political fortunes of others while pushing the empire ever closer to the war that will provide the further expansion of her steelworks. Every tank, every silencer, bayonet, and bullet her company makes will enrich her, and will punish Oskar–and through him, Max–for the roles they played in solving the murders her late father, steel magnate Brückmüller, committed in Vienna Blood’s very first mystery, “The Last Seance.” It’s a hard, bleak turn into film noir that still leaves the door open for future seasons. 

Looking ahead to potential future roles in genres he hasn’t worked in yet, Beard’s mind turns to horses. Not to play a horse, but to play a character who would believably be “swinging a sword on a horse,” maybe “some crazy king” in a historical drama or high fantasy. Right away, Maurer puckishly interjects, “It would instantly become a comedy!” with Beard riffing further that it could be “a Monty Python & the Holy Grail/Lord of the Rings [mash-up]” and alternately, he’d also likely relish “being on a horse with a gun, if it’s a cowboy” role. Casting directors, take note! 

Beard’s 2024 included two performances that called for dramatic and comedic chops in Monsieur Spade and Funny Woman’s second season. For his Monsieur Spade supporting role as a seemingly gormless Bertie Wooster-esque painter who turns out to be a formidable MI6 agent, he took Taekwondo and axe-throwing lessons. Once on set, stunt actors handled the axe-throwing because “I don’t think any insurance in the world would cover me throwing an axe at Clive Owen,” but “I did throw [him] onto the ground” in another scene. You’ve got to take your wins where you can get them. 

Beard was a bit cagier about his turn as queer comedy writer Bill Gardener in Funny Woman, which has its second season debut in the U.S. on Sunday, February 2, 2025, taking over Vienna Blood’s current PBS timeslot. However, he enjoyed revisiting the early 1960s, as it’s an “incredibly fruitful period for costume and makeup, and the locations [in and around Liverpool] are stunning.”

For his part, Maurer reflected on Oskar's action-packed season. The fight scenes in the cathedral as Oskar confronts Lazar Kiss – an up-close knife fight above the nave, followed by crashing onto and sliding down a steeply pitched roof to a widow's walk high above a busy square–posed thrilling challenges for the ex-gymnast. He was happy to hand off responsibilities to his "brilliant stuntman for the complicated stuff" but still wants to do as much of the stunt work as possible himself, saying, "I love the challenge, and I keep begging directors and producers for [permission] to do things that they don't want me to do," figuring he has another couple of years before leaving the bulk of it to stuntmen. 

If Vienna Blood's fourth season is its last, Maurer and Beard have many lovely, substantive memories to sustain them. The two waxed rhapsodic about working together and with the series's entire creative team over the last six years, highlighting their admiration for how much effort their colleagues put into re-creating tangible details of life at the turn of the 20th century to create an entire, textured world for them to play in.  

Everything from the "beautiful calligraphy and handwritten notes" furnished by the art department to the near-magic of being able to get in costume and "look into the mirror and say, 'oh, hey, there he is!'" came in for near-wondering praise from Beard and Maurer, respectively. For viewers, hope springs eternal that we'll once more be welcomed to the case for more of Inspector Rheinhardt and Dr. Liebermann's adventures. 

Vienna Blood Seasons 1 through 4 are available to stream on the PBS app, the PBS Masterpiece Prime Video Channel, and PBS Passport for members. As always, check your local listings and streamers.