Jakob von Eichel lives in Brooklyn with his architect wife and four and a half year old daughter. He was born in Toronto to a Canadian mother and a German father, raised in Washington DC, educated in New York, escaped to Russia, fled west to Berlin, and met his Mexican wife in Manhattan. So he's basically an international man of mystery with plenty of tricks up his sleeve as reflected in his eclectic career.
He has played a swath of some-time gun toting accented foreigners on television and in film - Serbs, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Germans - whose common thread, aside from a proclivity for violence, seems to be a similar sartorial sense; namely that mainstay of European bad guys everywhere - the turtleneck.
From Central European thugs, Russian pilots and squinting French hit men on TV, to British Lords and Virginian generals on the stage, Jakob is at home in many mediums and roles, but has, in the last few years, enjoyed playing less niche characters in more comedic settings, such as: the sassy costume designer on HBO's Doll & Em - incidentally, despite being American, also a fan of the turtleneck; a traumatized yuppie Spanish student in Spanish Class and other human catastrophes on Emma Ramos' critically acclaimed B.U.T.S. web-series. Spanish Class was chosen as a finalist in The NBCU Shorts Fest. And a less together version of himself (what he might be like if he had never met his wife) in Micah Perta's Daytime Noon, opposite Olivia Wilde and Dolly Wells which was featured in shortoftheweek.
He is a proud founding member of the theatre company Primitive Grace, which had its maiden voyage in artistic director Paul Calderon's original piece Fringe of Humanity, a black comedy exposing the shadier sides of life on location. Jakob had the great pleasure of playing a spineless heel of an actor/b-roll-cameraman very briefly turned tyrannical director and the even greater pleasure of playing this role on stage with two of his mentors Paul Calderon and David Zayas.
Jakob has also done extensive voice work. This includes ADR/Looping for several television shows (Miss Maisel, The Duece, Fosse/Vernon) and films (21 Bridges, Uncut Gems, The Goldfinch), as well as more traditional character voice work on several podcasts currently in development at iHearRadio.