One day the leader of the drama group that she attended after school each Monday asked Nadja Uhl if she had ever considered making acting her profession.

[1] Many years later, after setting up her own multi-generation multi-family house in Potsdam in 2005, with friends and relations ranging in age from 20 to 90,[1] she told an interviewer that childhood experience of living with aunts and grandparents taught her that this type of extended family community in a single home was a challenge which could only succeed if each member was allowed some free space.

Uhl first appeared in a film in 1993 (Thomas Koerfer's Der Grüne Heinrich, playing Agnes' role), but in 2000 she attracted international attention acting in Volker Schlöndorff's The Legend of Rita (Die Stille nach dem Schuß).

In 2005, Uhl played the role of Nicole in Summer in Berlin (Sommer vorm Balkon), directed by Andreas Dresen, and was nominated for Best Actress at the German Film Awards.

In the film, Uhl plays Brigitte Mohnhaupt, a member of the Red Army Faction (Rote Armee Fraktion or R.A.F., a German terrorist group of Marxist ideology active from the late 1960s to 1998), and leader of its second generation.

Also in 2008, Uhl participated in a TV production, also based on real events, about the Lufthansa Flight 181 hijacking (during the German Autumn of 1977), which was perpetrated by four terrorists of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in collusion with the R.A.F.

[4] Although the family in which she grew up was not particularly politicised during her early childhood, they were forced to confront an uglier side of the socialist paradise when her uncle was arrested during the later 1980s and imprisoned at Bautzen in connection with his "environmental activism which at that time was not welcome [to the authorities] in the GDR ... [Those activists] did nothing wrong.