From blockbusters to Cannes hits, Germany’s Sandra Hüller is on an amazing runFrom blockbusters to Cannes hits, Germany’s Sandra Hüller is on an amazing run
Four nominations in one year – the actress who could make Oscars history
No film star is having a year as good as Sandra Hüller. With Project Hail Mary smashing the box office, and new film Fatherland earning raves at Cannes, she could do the unprecedented.
We all know a potential Oscar clip when we see one. It’s that sequence in a film that seems designed to show off an actor’s skills – usually via a tear-jerking emotional speech. On one level, the sequence can be a film’s heart and soul. On another, more cynical level, it’s obvious that it will be shown again and again if the actor is nominated for an Academy Award.
In Pawel Pawlikowski’s new period drama, Fatherland, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday to rave reviews, Sandra Hüller has an impeccable Oscar clip. Pawlikowski’s stark black-and-white film follows Thomas Mann, the author, and his daughter, Erika, played by Hüller, as they drive through the newly divided Germany in 1949. Her Oscar clip is set in a hotel lobby, where Erika talks on the phone about a recent death in the family. She keeps herself under control, but flashes of fear, grief, hope and tender concern flicker across her face. It’s a heart-wrenching moment in an exceptional film. We may see it regularly when awards season rolls around in a few months’ time, if she is (deservedly) nominated for best actress for the performance.
What’s unusual is that we may see three more Oscar clips featuring Hüller, too. The German actress has long been revered in her home country, but broke out internationally with her Oscar-nominated turn in 2023 marital thriller Anatomy of a Fall, then recently ventured into Hollywood blockbusters, playing Eva Stratt, the no-nonsense mission controller in sci-fi mega-hit Project Hail Mary. Now there’s an outside chance the German actress could make history as the first actor to receive four Academy Award nominations in the same year.
Amazon/ MGMAt the start of May, the Academy announced some changes to its rules. One of these is that, from now on, an actor/actress can be nominated for more than one performance in the same category. That means that if they’re particularly brilliant in two different films, they could nab two best actor/actress nominations. But, as some commentators have noted, Hüller could be recognised four times over: twice for best actress and twice for best supporting actress.
The amazing run of films
She is already a best supporting actress favourite for her role bossing Ryan Gosling around in Project Hail Mary. The Oscar clip? It has to be the aircraft-carrier karaoke scene in which she invests Harry Styles’s Sign of the Times with crushing layers of meaning before Eva snaps, “And that is enough”.
In October, Hüller will be seen in another big-budget US film alongside another superstar. She co-stars with Tom Cruise in Digger, a black comedy directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. Not much has been revealed about it yet, but Iñárritu’s previous hits include Birdman and The Revenant, so it would be a shock if this one didn’t rack up half a dozen Oscar nominations. A second best supporting actress nod for Hüller could easily be one of them.
The film that might earn her another lead actress nomination is Rose, an Austrian drama that premiered to universal praise at the Berlin Film Festival in February. Much of that praise went to Hüller for playing a woman disguised as a man in a village in the 1600s. And the barnstorming speech when she furiously stands up for herself against the aggrieved villagers? It’s an Oscar clip, without a doubt.
Two austere black-and-white European arthouse dramas. Two splashy, star-powered US blockbusters. Could Hüller really be nominated for all four of them? Admittedly, it’s several months too early to say for sure, but the prospect isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem.
Her rise to the top
One factor in her favour is that the Academy has taken steps to diversify its membership recently, and is now more willing than ever to celebrate actors for roles that aren’t in English. Another factor is that Hollywood has discovered Hüller two decades into her big-screen career. It used to be said that there were few decent film roles for actresses over the age of 40, but that doesn’t seem to apply to Hüller, aged 48. She is one of those overnight successes that takes 20 years.
Cannes Film FestivalTen years ago, she first made a splash outside Germany when Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann debuted at Cannes in 2016, and went on to win the Oscar for best foreign language film in 2017. The qualities that viewers have come to treasure in Hüller were all there: the fierce intelligence, the bracing air of condescending disapproval, the glimmers of knowing humour, the brittle dignity, and the torrents of pain and anger that burst through that dignity when least expected. In one of the comedy’s many stand-out scenes, Hüller’s uptight businesswoman lets loose and belts out Whitney Houston’s Greatest Love of All. You have to wonder if the makers of Project Hail Mary had it in mind when they shot their karaoke scene.
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Certainly, Toni Erdmann could have been Hüller’s ticket to Hollywood, but she felt at the time that she might need a makeover to be accepted in the US. “I have to decide if I really want this or not,” she said with typical crispness in an interview in the Guardian in 2017. “I don’t – so that’s probably it with my American career.”
Three years ago, though, Hüller became impossible for the rest of the world to ignore. At Cannes in 2023, she had heavyweight roles in the year’s two most talked-about foreign-language dramas, playing the haughty wife of a Nazi concentration camp’s commandant in The Zone of Interest, and an author who may or may not have killed her husband in Anatomy of a Fall. The films were nominated for five Oscars each, including that best actress nod for Hüller for Anatomy of a Fall.
It’s not surprising that Ryan and Tom thought that she could bring invaluable European rigour to their next films. And it won’t be surprising if the Academy’s voters agree with them.
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