Wrigley has made many appearances in British TV programmes such as Phoenix Nights (where he was Dodgy Eric, who sold club owner Brian Potter a Das Boot fruit machine, a bucking bronco and an obscene bouncy castle), Emmerdale (as eccentric rocket inventor Barry Clegg), and his sixth character in Coronation Street (as the Rev. Marvin Winstanley, the dodgy internet priest Roy and Hayley approached to arrange their wedding).
In 1977 he wrote a script for the movie adaption of Lothar-Günther Buchheims novel Das Boot, but it was rejected by Buchheim.
Serrano's performance of La Paloma was used in the 1981 film Das Boot by Wolfgang Petersen, and in the 1993 production of the film The House of the Spirits, after the novel by Chilean author Isabel Allende.
He made an uncredited appearance in Das Boot as an officer aboard the resupply ship Weser.
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The abbreviation of the title to "Kaleu" (contemporary usage) is used in verbal communication; the commander of the Type VIIC U-boat U96 in the film Das Boot was of this rank, and called "Herr Kaleun" (historical usage) by his crew.
The seventh patrol was the approximate time that Lothar-Günther Buchheim boarded U-96 and documented the boat's successes in his book Das Boot.
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The story of the U-96 was eventually made into a mini-series and film called Das Boot, in which he was portrayed by Jürgen Prochnow.
In the 1981 German film Das Boot, Director Wolfgang Petersen uses the term Hitlerjugendführer to describe the second in command of the featured German U-Boot, indicating the stern and "by-the-book" manner of the second officer in contrast to the more realistic views of the boat's captain played by Jürgen Prochnow.
His most well-known roles internationally have been as the sympathetic submarine captain in Das Boot (1981), Duke Leto Atreides I in Dune (1984), the minor, but important role of Kazakh dictator General Ivan Radek in Air Force One and the antagonist Maxwell Dent in Beverly Hills Cop II.
He was best known for his roles as the Chief Engineer (the LI) in Das Boot and as Faber in the TV series Der Fahnder.