Waldemar Schultz on playing role inspired by famed SA cop Piet Byleveld

Popular kykNET series, Die Byl, is back on TV come 16 January 2022 and Waldemar Schultz, who plays the role of Colonel Piet van der Bijl, says it’s a role he enjoyed tremendously, especially because the character is so much different to who he is in real life.

“It was a wonderful experience,” he says.

For him, the key to acting lies in analysing text.

“When you have that big picture in your head, then the character starts building itself inside you.

He says although Der Bijl is very different to him, portraying the role came to him relatively naturally.

“Especially with the first season, I felt that I really had to make this character work and that there is a lot about him that is not like me.”

Waldemar says what makes the filming of a series like Die Byl difficult is the tempo at which it gets filmed.

“You just need to keep track. You work on something like 18 movies at the same time.”

He says with Die Byl, they luckily filmed it almost chronologically, which made it a little easier. That, and the fact that they were “a fantastic team”.

After shooting four seasons with the team, Waldemar says he would go to war with every one of them.

Die Byl was built on similar principles as some of the Scandinavian crime series. Still, Waldemar says you need to be careful not to let other things influence your acting and that he let the text talk for itself.

“I think we had a very strong writing team.”

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The actor also had the privilege of spending some time with the late Piet Byleveld.

“This is not the biographical thing,” he says, but Byleveld was definitely the inspiration for the story.

“It was a wonderful opportunity to sit down with him and ask him how his head worked,” says Waldemar.

“At one point, I asked him how he switches it all off; how do you get those images out of your head? Then he just said that he enjoyed riding a horse with his dog beside him.”

Waldemar says it was there that he realised that you need to have a very special kind of mind to be able to do what Byleveld did, which is something he strives to portray in Die Byl.

“It was a nice key for me,” says Waldemar.

“This guy, he’s not like the rest of us. He has a world of his own, which he doesn’t create, but builds from external things that he observes, feels, sees and so on. He’s not very sociably competent. He lives here, not there like the rest of us. That was probably my most key approach to how this man’s mind works,” he says about the role he portrays in the series.

According to Waldemar, the first season of Die Byl was merely an introduction to Colonel Piet van der Bijl. It was only in the second season that it became more about the team and the interpersonal relationships.

Each of the characters became more important to Die Byl, but also to the viewers. The third season “brought a lot of deeper stuff out of Byl”, says Waldemar.

Every character’s personality and personal life struggles came to light in the third season. Season four is “a law unto itself”, says Waldemar, “but I’m not going to say anything”.

According to Waldemar, Die Byl’s fourth season is worth watching because of a golden thread that will keep viewers intrigued and interested.

Watch Die Byl on kykNET (DStv channel 144) from 16 January 2022 at 8pm. The series will also be available on DStv Catchup.