Patrick Dreikauss

Patrick Dreikauss is a German actor and casting director whose career has quietly spanned three decades — moving from on-screen roles in the late 1990s to a behind-the-scenes focus that now defines most of his professional output. Born in 1970 (TMDB), he's probably best known to casual viewers for appearing in the 2005 Sci-Fi Channel creature feature *Mansquito* and the ABC television movie *Sabrina Goes to Rome* (1998), the kind of projects that don't win awards but do build a working actor's résumé in a real, unglamorous way. What's striking is how deliberately he seems to have pivoted: rather than chasing more screen time, Dreikauss built institutional infrastructure — a school, a casting studio, a whole parallel career that most actors don't attempt.

He trained at the Ron Burrus conservatory in Los Angeles from 1991 to 1999 (IMDb), which gave him nearly a decade of American industry exposure before he returned to Germany and started building something of his own. That something turned out to be the New Talent Acting School for Kids and Teens, which he founded in Hamburg in 2001, and later the pd-casting Studio, operating out of Hamburg and Berlin with a specialty in casting children, teens, and young adults. His casting work has continued into recent years, with credits on Gore Verbinski's *The Phoenician Scheme* (2025) and *Intimate.* (2023) listed among his more current contributions (Apple TV, IMDb).

Hard to say if Dreikauss ever intended to step back from acting entirely — his 2016 appearance in *A Cure for Wellness*, on which he also worked in the casting department, suggests the two roles can coexist. A dual practitioner, essentially. Not a household name, but a consistent professional presence across a surprisingly wide range of projects (Rotten Tomatoes, Filmaffinity).