In keeping with the times, Reinhard Genzel was in the middle of a virtual conference when he was surprised by the call announcing, “This is Stockholm!” In this interview with Adam Smith he briefly summarises his 40 year effort to image the galactic centre, which began with his joining his “second father”, 1964 Nobel Laureate in Physics Charles Townes, as a postdoc in Berkeley. Genzel describes the new technological developments that allow him to sense the gravity of the supermassive black hole by observing the motion of the stars orbiting it with exquisite precision, and looks ahead to possible future tests of the theory of general relativity in the decades to come