Katja Schuurman states that Albert Verlinde was really angry with her for years because of a rather inappropriate AIDS joke in the feature film Interview. “An actress is an empty shell.”
© SBS, NPO
It has been twenty years since Theo van Gogh was violently murdered and last night he was commemorated at the table of Jeroen Pauw in Bar Let. One of the guests was Katja Schuurman, who played the leading role in Theo’s film Interview. In that film a pretty crude joke is made about show king Albert Verlinde.
‘Everyone has AIDS’
Jeroen shows precisely that fragment to his viewers. “Is your name Pierre?”, Katja’s character says to fellow actor Pierre Bokma’s character. “I don’t know you at all. Are you from the show editors? Albert Verlinde, who died of AIDS, wasn’t he from the show editors? And you are his successor?”
Her character — Katja plays a cliché of herself in the film — continues: “Just be careful that you don’t get AIDS too. I think everyone in your newspaper has AIDS. It’s more like the Gay Newspaper, hahaha.”
Ferocious Albert
Katja is shocked that this fragment was selected by Jeroen’s editors. “Thank you again for this fragment, because Albert Verlinde did not thank me for it. We finally spoke up. I told him, ‘It was just my text. An actress is an empty shell. I just get texts and I speak them.’”
She continues: “He then did Boulevard and for a long time he said things like: ‘Oh, there’s Katja Schuurman again, she’s way too fat!’ Well, very negative reporting about me, so thanks for bringing this up again. Fine!”
Hurt
Jeroen thinks that Albert can now place this. “Well, okay, but you have now also explained to Albert through this that an actress is an empty shell. Then he also understands that he can’t blame you again.”
Fellow guest Hanneke Groenteman states that Theo wanted to achieve exactly this. “If he hit it, he had a bite. Then he came all over, really. He really loved that. If people, like Albert Verlinde, were hurt and reacted to it. Then he had a bite…”
