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. Later I became the skater, the class clown — the one who could make people laugh. There were school plays along the way, but while part of me wanted to go to drama school, the advice around me was clear: do a “real” study first.
So I did. I studied Communication Science in Amsterdam, including a semester 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 got a small part. My scene didn't make the final film, but that almost didn't matter. Something had been switched back on.
Wanting to understand what to do with that, I eventually met casting director Domnica Cîrciumaru. During our 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.
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. Learning to really use what was inside me, and allowing myself to feel it, was scary.
But it 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, 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, I knew I needed a change too.
Going back to the Netherlands and being closer to my family 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 and to step outside what I already knew.
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 learned from different teachers, explored different approaches and, for the first time, did 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.
By the end of that year, things seemed to be going better. Then an unexpected opportunity took me to Alicante, 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.