In the glittering whirlwind of international television, where scripts arrive like midnight deliveries and red-eye flights blur into endless auditions, few actors manage to juggle the chaos of fame with the quiet rigor of a double life. Damian Hardung, the 28-year-old German heartthrob whose portrayal of the brooding, blue-blooded James Beaufort in Prime Video’s Maxton Hall: The World Between Us has catapulted him from European indie darling to global sensation, is one such enigma. With over 100 million hours streamed worldwide since its April 2024 debut, Maxton Hall—a lavish adaptation of Mona Kasten’s bestselling YA novel Save Me—has become a cultural juggernaut, blending the opulent intrigue of Gossip Girl with the emotional depth of Normal People, all set against the ivy-clad spires of a fictional elite British boarding school. Hardung’s James, a silver-spooned heir whose icy facade cracks to reveal a vulnerable core, has sparked fan theories, TikTok thirst edits, and a fervent #JamesRuby ship that dominates social media. But beneath the chiseled jawline and piercing blue eyes that have earned him comparisons to a young Timothée Chalamet, Hardung harbors a secret weapon against the burnout that devours so many of his peers: a parallel path in medicine. In an exclusive interview with People magazine, conducted amid the autumnal hush of a Berlin café overlooking the Spree, Hardung opens up about the “necessary insanity” of studying for medical exams while filming the show’s second season, the grounding rituals that keep him sane, and why this dual existence isn’t just survival—it’s his superpower. As Maxton Hall Season 2 gears up for a 2026 release, Hardung’s story isn’t just a tale of stardom’s highs; it’s a raw, inspiring blueprint for thriving in a world that demands you do it all, flawlessly, yesterday.

To understand Damian Hardung’s meteoric rise and the Herculean effort it takes to sustain it, one must first trace the threads back to his beginnings in a sleepy suburb of Munich, where the son of a teacher and a civil servant first discovered that stories could be both escape and armor. Born on July 8, 1997, Hardung was a lanky teen with a mop of unruly blond hair and a penchant for diving into books that transported him far from the routine of Bavarian classrooms. “I was the kid who read The Name of the Wind under the desk during math,” he recalls with a self-deprecating grin, his voice carrying the soft lilt of a man who’s as comfortable in English as he is in German. Acting beckoned early—roles in German TV staples like Alarm für Cobra 11 and the 2016 film The Nanny—but it was his breakout as the tormented protagonist in the 2018 Netflix miniseries Freud that hinted at the depth lurking beneath his boy-next-door charm. There, as the titular psychoanalyst in his youth, Hardung channeled a brooding intensity that earned him a nomination for Best Young Actor at the German Television Awards, proving he could command the screen with more than just looks.

Maxton Hall, however, was the lightning bolt. Adapted from Kasten’s wildly popular trilogy (Save Me, Save You, Save Us), the series follows Ruby Bell (Harriet Herbig-Matten), a scholarship student from a working-class background who infiltrates the elite Oxford-inspired Croyden Academy and unwittingly sparks a forbidden romance with James Beaufort, the school’s untouchable heir. Hardung’s James is a masterclass in layered villainy: arrogant and aloof on the surface, but riddled with cracks—family pressures, a mother’s emotional neglect, a father’s corporate machinations—that make him achingly relatable. “James isn’t a bad guy; he’s a product of a world that taught him love is a transaction,” Hardung explains, leaning forward over his untouched espresso, his blue eyes—those “windows to a storm,” as co-creator Christiane Sorg once called them—intensifying with the memory. The chemistry with Herbig-Matten crackles from the pilot’s charged elevator encounter, their push-pull dynamic evolving from antagonism to alliance in a narrative that explores class warfare, mental health, and the intoxicating peril of first love. Season 1’s cliffhanger—a shocking family revelation that upends James’s world—left fans clamoring for more, with the finale’s 20 million global views in its first week shattering Prime Video records for a non-English series.

Yet, even as Maxton Hall reshaped Hardung’s career—landing him on Variety‘s “10 Actors to Watch” list and a flood of offers from Hollywood (rumors swirl of a Dune spin-off and a lead in A24’s next prestige drama)—he was quietly waging another battle: the relentless grind of medical school at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin. Enrolled since 2020 after a gap year pondering his path post-Freud, Hardung chose medicine not as a fallback, but as a foundation. “Acting is ephemeral—brilliant one day, forgotten the next. Medicine? That’s permanence. It’s about fixing what’s broken in a way that lasts.” Balancing the two worlds has been, in his words, “necessary to stay sane,” a mantra that echoes through our conversation like a lifeline thrown across a chasm. Filming Maxton Hall Season 1 in Croatia’s sun-drenched Dalmatian Coast meant cramming anatomy flashcards into suitcase pockets, stealing midnight study sessions between takes where he’d quiz himself on neurovascular bundles while the Adriatic lapped at the shore. “I’d be in full James mode—staring daggers at Harriet during a heated scene—then duck into my trailer to memorize the Krebs cycle. It’s madness, but it’s my madness.”

The “necessary insanity” peaked during Season 2 production, which wrapped principal photography in October 2025 after a grueling six-month shoot split between Berlin’s opulent estates (standing in for Croyden’s hallowed halls) and Scotland’s mist-shrouded Highlands for the Beaufort family’s crumbling ancestral pile. Hardung, fresh off a summer of clinical rotations in emergency medicine—where he assisted in a trauma bay during a multi-car pileup that left him “shaking for days”—returned to set with a backpack stuffed with textbooks and a laptop running Anki decks on pharmacology. “Guillermo del Toro once said making movies is like herding cats; for me, it’s herding cats while solving quadratic equations in the dark.” Scenes demanding emotional acrobatics, like James’s unraveling in a rain-soaked confrontation with his estranged mother (played by the formidable Lena Headey), were shot back-to-back with night shoots, leaving Hardung to collapse into hotel beds at dawn, earbuds piping lectures on electrocardiograms into his exhausted brain. Co-star Herbig-Matten, who became a confidante during the isolation of Croatia’s COVID protocols, recalls his resilience with awe: “Damian’s the guy who’d finish a 14-hour day, then FaceTime his study group at 2 a.m. to debate differential diagnoses. He’s not just talented; he’s tenacious. It makes James’s vulnerability hit harder—you see the man behind the mask.”

Hardung’s candor about the toll is as disarming as it is inspiring, a deliberate pushback against the myth of the effortless star. “The glamour? It’s 5% of the job. The rest is rejection emails, jet lag that feels like a hangover from hell, and the constant whisper that you’re one bad take from irrelevance.” Med school, he insists, is his anchor—a realm of concrete truths amid acting’s subjective storms. “When I sutured my first laceration in sim lab, I felt… capable. Not ‘good enough’ or ‘marketable’—just capable. That’s the sanity I chase.” His routine is a study in disciplined delirium: mornings at Charité for lectures on pathophysiology, afternoons on set mastering James’s aristocratic drawl (coached by dialect expert Emma Clark to evoke a “posh but perilous” Oxford lilt), evenings in a cramped flat poring over Gray’s Anatomy while Maxton Hall dailies play muted on a second screen for line immersion. Sleep? “A luxury I negotiate with coffee and sheer spite.” Yet, he credits small rituals for the ballast: weekly runs along the Spree where he podcasts This American Life to decompress, cooking his grandmother’s sauerbraten recipe as a “taste of home” after wrap parties, and mandatory “no-phone Sundays” spent lost in a bookstore, emerging with stacks of thrillers that fuel his character work—Donna Tartt’s The Secret History for James’s elite ennui, Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends for the messy intimacy of young love.

The fruits of this frenzy are evident in Maxton Hall‘s sophomore season, teased in a November 2025 Prime Video sizzle reel that sent the fandom into overdrive. Without spoiling the labyrinthine plot—Ruby’s ascent into Croyden’s inner circle unearths scandals that threaten the Beaufort dynasty, forcing James to choose between loyalty and love—Hardung’s expanded arc promises a “James unmasked,” delving into his psyche with flashbacks to a childhood gilded yet grotesque, shadowed by a father’s corporate conquests and a mother’s glacial affections. “Season 1 was the courtship; Season 2 is the collision,” Hardung teases, his eyes alight with the thrill of revelation. “James learns that power isn’t in the name—it’s in the choices you make when no one’s watching.” Herbig-Matten’s Ruby evolves too, her scholarship-girl grit tempered by newfound agency, their romance a tempest of stolen kisses in hidden alcoves and tearful confessions under moonlit quads. Returning castmates like Fedja van Huêt as the scheming headmaster and Ben Felipe as Ruby’s loyal brother add layers of intrigue, while new faces—rumored to include a mysterious American transfer student played by rising star Ayo Edebiri—promise fresh friction. Filming’s challenges were manifold: Berlin’s relentless November rains turning outdoor shoots into hypothermia marathons, a writers’ room strike delaying reshoots, and Hardung’s own bout with laryngitis that forced him to lip-sync key scenes. “Screaming James’s rage while whispering medical mnemonics? Peak Damian chaos,” he laughs.

Beyond the screen, Hardung’s duality has reshaped his public persona from pretty-boy pinup to principled polymath. Post-Maxton Hall Season 1, he launched “Stitch & Script,” a podcast where actors and medics swap war stories—Chloë Grace Moretz on set anxiety, Dr. Atul Gawande on surgical precision—garnering 500,000 downloads in its first season. He’s an advocate for mental health in the arts, partnering with the German Actors’ Fund for on-set therapists, inspired by his own “dark days” during Freud‘s isolation. “Fame amplifies everything—the highs are stratospheric, the lows abyssal. Med school taught me to triage: prioritize the bleeders, bandage the bruises.” Personally, Hardung remains resolutely single, his Instagram a curated calm of Berlin bike rides and dog-eared paperbacks, a deliberate counterpoint to the tabloid frenzy over his Euphoria days. “Relationships in this life? They’re like trying to date a ghost—always half-present.” Yet, whispers of a low-key romance with a fellow Charité student persist, fueling fanfic fodder on AO3.

As Maxton Hall Season 2 looms—trailer expected January 2026, full release mid-year—Hardung eyes the horizon with equal parts trepidation and triumph. A lead in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer adaptation awaits, alongside a medical elective in trauma surgery that could pause his reel for reels. “If I can stitch a wound while memorizing monologues, I can handle whatever comes,” he says, raising his espresso in mock toast. In an industry that chews up its young, Hardung’s “necessary to stay sane” ethos isn’t just survival—it’s strategy, a blueprint for a career that honors both the heart’s wild beats and the mind’s steady pulse. As Ruby and James navigate their world’s treacherous tides, so too does Damian Hardung chart his own: a path where passion and purpose collide, not in conflict, but in harmony. In Maxton Hall‘s hallowed halls, he found his spark; in medicine’s quiet corridors, he found his compass. Together, they light a way forward—for him, and for all who dare to dream in dual dimensions.