MY STORY
And honestly, I think I needed to.
I was an energetic, imaginative kid. Give me a few Action Men, some Playmobil or just an empty room and I could disappear into stories for hours. I created characters, worlds and adventures without ever thinking of it as acting. It was simply how I played.
At school, I stood out. I was the smart kid, the ginger kid, the gymnast and the boy scout. I was bullied too, and didn't always feel like I belonged. There were Easter plays and Christmas plays along the way, but my actual childhood dream was becoming a dolphin trainer.
High school gave me a fresh start. I became the skater, the class clown, the one who could make people laugh. At the same time, life at home became much more serious, and I was very aware that there were two different sides of me: the one I showed to the outside world and everything I kept underneath.
When it came time to choose what was next, I wanted to go to drama school to study comedy. But the advice around me was clear: do a “real” study first. So I did.
I studied Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam, including a semester studying Politics and Media at Sciences Po in Paris.
Acting remained somewhere in the background.
In early 2016, I accepted a job offer in Bucharest. I knew very little about Romania and thought I'd probably stay for a year. I ended up calling it home for almost seven.
For the first few months, acting wasn't really part of my life there. Then one evening, I met a girl in a bar who asked me, almost out of nowhere, if I was an actor. I told her I'd always wanted to act, and she mentioned an opportunity to be part of The Sisters Brothers, which was filming in Romania.
I applied, got cast in a small part and suddenly found myself on a film set with people like Joaquin Phoenix. My scene didn't make the final film, but that almost didn't matter. Something had been switched back on.
After that experience, I wanted to understand how I could take acting further. That eventually brought me to casting director Domnica Cîrciumaru. We met casually at her casting office and talked about where I came from, what I'd done with acting and where I wanted to go with it.
During that conversation, she picked up the phone and called acting coach Nicoleta Petcu. Not long after, I walked into Nicoleta's studio for the first time.
That meeting changed the direction of my life in Romania. I had rediscovered acting — but now I was about to actually learn the craft.
Acting is the art of being human.
Nicoleta taught me that acting is the art of being human. That meant learning to work with all of it — the emotions, experiences and parts of myself I'd spent years pushing away.
Suddenly, those things weren't something I needed to hide from. They could become part of the work. But understanding that and actually allowing myself to be vulnerable were two very different things. Learning to really use what was inside me — and allowing myself to feel it — was scary.
It also changed everything.
A little later, I auditioned for Umbre, an HBO Europe series. I was scared to death during the casting. Part of me genuinely felt like I didn't belong there yet.
And then I got the role.
It wasn't about the size of the role. For me, it was confirmation. I was training, I was taking acting seriously, and now I was working on a professional set. It felt like proof that I was moving in the right direction.
Somewhere along the way, Romania became home.
I kept training, auditioning and working whenever the opportunity came. There were commercials, smaller roles, long days on set and plenty of moments where nothing seemed to happen at all. Slowly, acting stopped feeling like this impossible thing I was trying to break into. It became part of my life.
And so did Romania.
What I thought would be one year turned into almost seven. I built friendships there, learned enough Romanian to get myself into — and occasionally out of — trouble, and discovered a country far beyond the version I had imagined before moving there.
Bucharest could be chaotic, loud and completely unpredictable. Outside the city, life could suddenly feel incredibly simple. I loved that contrast. Somewhere in those years, without really noticing when it happened, I stopped feeling like I was living abroad.
I was home.
And Romania gave me something else too: Foxy. She found me on the streets there and, naturally, decided she was coming along for the rest of the story.
Eventually, I knew it was time to leave.
Romania had become home, which made leaving it anything but obvious. But after almost seven years, my life had changed. I knew I needed a change too.
Going back to the Netherlands — and being closer to my family after so much time away — felt like the right thing to do. So Foxy and I packed up our life in Romania and went home.
Back in the Netherlands, I had to find my place again.
Coming back also meant finding my way into the Dutch acting world. Most of my experience had been abroad and in English, while the industry I was returning to was Dutch.
I wanted to build a stronger connection with that world. I also wanted to train differently — to step outside what I already knew and see what else was there.
Traditional drama school wasn't really an option anymore because of my age, and that search eventually led me to De Nederlandse Acteursschool.
Suddenly, I was back in a classroom, surrounded by actors who challenged me and made me want to get better. I was learning from different teachers, exploring different approaches and, for the first time, doing all of it in Dutch.
After De Nederlandse Acteursschool, I went back into corporate work.
Six months later, my body and mind pulled the handbrake. I burned out.
Suddenly, work and career plans weren't the priority anymore. I needed time to recover.
By the end of that year, things seemed to be going better. Then the opportunity came up to move to Alicante, Spain. It wasn't part of some carefully thought-out plan. It was more of a why not?
So at the beginning of 2025, I packed up again and moved to Spain.
Alicante gave me something I hadn't had in a while: space.
I slowed down, recovered and spent a year figuring out what I wanted the next chapter of my life to look like.
These days, I know why I do it.
The longer I've done this, the more interested I've become in finding something truthful. Something recognisably human.
That's what I love about it.
A film, a series or a play can make someone feel happiness, sadness, love, anger or loss — or finally feel something they've been pushing away. Even if it's only for a moment.
I think those moments matter.
I don't know where acting will take me next. That's part of what makes it exciting.
I just know I want to keep telling stories that make people feel.