How David Hasselhoff became a caricature of himself to survive in Hollywood

At 68, David Hasselhoff is reluctant to retire.

Although, perhaps, the most accurate thing would be to say that the one who refuses to hang up the life preserver is 'The Hoff', the cartoonish alter ego of the protagonist of

Baywatch,

who in recent years has appropriated the career of the mythical actor from Baltimore.

On

his new TV series

Ze Network

, the performer will play a parody of himself "caught in the middle of an international Cold War assassin conspiracy" while starring in a theater play in Berlin.

The project is the latest proof of his status as a

walking

meme

, which he has cultivated without shame or complex, and that another handful of old glories are trying to replicate as well to stay current in the industry.

"Fact or fiction, you decide."

The gamble with which Hasselhoff described the spirit of the

Ze Network

could be applied to his most recent professional career, focused on exploring the frontiers of metafiction with that enthusiastic, backward-looking symbiote who pays his bills today.

In addition to having made cameos in films as diverse as

Guardians of the Galaxy

and

Brain Drain 2

, in

the series

Hoff the Record he

played another caricature of his personality who moved to London to try to revive his career in the industry. British.

In

Killing Hasselhoff

, a 2017 film, he became the target of a nightclub owner who sought to liquidate him to pay off a significant financial debt.

"The Hoff generates much more money than Hasselhoff, so I go wherever he goes," acknowledges the actor pragmatically.

“It strikes me as a smart and audacious outlet for these stars of the past.

Either that, or that a successful director rescue them and give them back a bit of dignity ”, journalist Álvaro Corazón Rural explains to ICON, who back in 2018 in

Jot Down

signed

a sketch of the actor's musical success in Europe at the end of the eighties.

“The great capital of an artist today is the attention that he can generate around him.

All the big stars, whether they are established, meritorious or decadent like Hasselhoff, enjoy this capital, they do not need to start from scratch and they can make it profitable in many ways as a marketing strategy ”, he adds.

David Hasselhoff, in San Sebastián in 2019. JESÚS URIARTE

From Charlie Sheen to Nicolas Cage, passing through James Van Der Beek or a Jean-Claude Van Damme who has explored both in film

(JCVD)

and on television

(Jean-Claude Van Johnson)

his role as an ousted 90s action star, the examples of actors come to less resigned to get all the dramatic and economic juice out of this condition are multiplying.

In Spain,

what happened to Jorge Sanz?

It is one of the clearest paradigms of this genre, with David Trueba theorizing about the decline as a leading man in Spanish cinema of the protagonist of

Si te dice que caí.

More than ten years after its premiere, Sanz seems to have adhered to that profile and is already a common face in the television formats of the national grill such as

Come to dinner with me: gourmet edition

.

In the case of Nicolas Cage, who also embraces that perception of an eccentric and over-acted performer in countless after-dinner action movies, the actor summed up with a classic saying the generalized attitude among those who experience the phenomenon of becoming aware of their own character and exploit him: "If you can't beat your enemy, join him."

Cage has recently channeled this profile again, serving as host of the Netflix docuseries

The Story of Words

, which makes the most of the restless qualities of its host.

Before giving life to Michael Knight, Hasselhoff had made a name in the American industry thanks to his participation in the soap opera

The Young and the Restless,

in which he appeared for six years playing a medical student.

After 850 episodes, he left the role to talk to KITT in

The Fantastic Car,

one of the essential fictions of the eighties.

"We live in a time of

retromania

that multiplies exponentially," adds Álvaro Corazón.

“The past is vindicated at every level, every decade, and it's fun to see how shabby it was and the harsh values ​​that the character used to embody.

Their vindication is part of this kind of decadent party that we celebrate now ”.

The news of the

Ze Network

premiere

is especially symbolic considering that the chain that produces the series today, the German RTL, is the same one that broadcast

The Fantastic Car

in the mid-eighties

and made Hasselhoff one of the biggest stars in the country German ... and the unexpected hero of reunification.

David Hasselhoff singing in 1989 during the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Get over that, Angela Merkel.

December 31, 1989. Thousands of Germans gather on the remains of the recently collapsed wall to welcome the new year and, above all, that Mr. Marshall in a luminescent jacket and scarf stamped with piano keys that symbolized the cohesion of the country.

On a construction crane, Hasselhoff sang to freedom with his hit

Looking for Freedom,

a cover of the classic

Auf Der Strasse Nach Suden,

which had hypertrophied thanks to (or because of) the popularity achieved in the crime series.

While the fiction was completely unknown to the citizens of East Germany, the song was a success on both sides of the wall, becoming an unexpected soundtrack to a key moment in international geopolitics.

It shipped more than a million records and was at the top of the charts for two months.

Hasselhoff was probably already a meme long before anyone invented that word.

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