He refused to join the school's theater group, feeling it was only for kids who were trying to "suck up" to the teachers.

[2] He studied acting from 1994 until 1998 at the Konrad Wolf Film University of Babelsberg in Potsdam.

[2] Since 1996, Matičević has acted in several crime series and films for German television and cinema.

[2] In 2007, he played the role of the German poet and novelist Clemens Brentano in the film Das Gelübde, which depicts Brentano's encounter with the stigmatised nun Anne Catherine Emmerich.

Matičević's first international role was in the TNT miniseries The Company in 2006, a show about the CIA in which he played a fictional Hungarian poet called Arpad Zelk, a leader of the Hungarian uprising in 1956.