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After Sandra Hüller learned that two films she stars in, “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest,” had been selected for competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, she was a little apprehensive about what What it could mean to her. anonymity. The German actress has always had a delicate relationship with fame: Aside from her role in the bittersweet 2016 film “Toni Erdmann,” she has mostly kept a low profile, working in German theater.
But what happened next exceeded even his wildest expectations. “Anatomy of a Fall,” a French drama in which Hüller plays a woman accused of murdering her husband, won the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top honor, and “The Zone of Interest,” a film about the Holocaust. , took the Grand Prize, or second prize. Los Angeles Times crowned her “queen of Cannes” and, in a few weeks, she will travel from her home in Leipzig, Germany, to Hollywood to attend the Oscars, where she is nominated for best actress, for “Anatomy.”
This attention has been challenging for Hüller, sometimes overwhelmingly so, and she is now grappling with what the nomination, and the scrutiny that comes with it, means for her and her career. “It means being accepted in a circle of people that she wasn’t in before,” she said in a recent interview in Leipzig. “But I don’t know if it means success or if it will make everything easier.”
Sitting in a cafe with her black Weimaraner under the table, she was warm but a little guarded as she talked about her newfound global fame. “I like my life. I like my apartment. I like my daily routine. There’s nothing missing that I had to make up for. I didn’t expect this to happen,” said Hüller, 45. “But it means that now people think I can do “Things that maybe they didn’t think they could do before.”
It was also surprising, he noted, because “Anatomy of a Fall” is not a typical Oscar movie. An ambiguous exploration of language, gender dynamics, and toxic relationships, it centers on the question of whether Hüller’s character, a German writer also named Sandra, pushed her husband out a window to her death. The film culminates in a series of courtroom scenes in which a judge (and the audience) must weigh her possible guilt.
In an email, “Anatomy of a Fall” director Justine Triet said Hüller was distinguished by “the absence of any kind of seduction both on and off the set,” adding that she “says what she thinks and is very direct.” This honesty, he said, “is probably what gives her so much power on the set: she is real.”
The performance, Hüller observed, seemed to have resonated with many women. “People take this film very personally,” Hüller said, adding that since its release she has been approached by women who have told her stories of their relationships or of being caught up in misogynistic legal trials.
However, he didn’t know why he had touched such a sensitive spot. “I’d have to be a market researcher, right?” she said. (Hüller doesn’t like to speculate in interviews.)
“The Zone of Interest” offers a very different sample of his talent. In the film she plays Hedwig Höß, the wife of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höß, a woman who enjoys domestic bliss next to the extermination camp. In an email, Jonathan Glazer, the film’s British director, said Hüller was able to “extinguish the inner life” of her to “portray the lousy essence of someone who has fully normalized the suffering of others.”
Hüller had broken his long-standing rule of not playing Nazis in the film, in part, he said, because he felt Glazer had grappled deeply with the sensitivities around portraying the Holocaust. He rejected criticism that the film was too stylized or too focused on the Höß family. “This movie is all about the victims,” he said. “I think viewers relate it to the suffering, not the perpetrators.”
Filmed on a set built next to the actual countryside, in Poland, Glazer filmed with several static cameras simultaneously, sometimes without telling the actors when they were filming. (Hüller’s own Weimaraner plays the family dog on screen.) The approach, Hüller said, suited his stage experience well, because Glazer, who has also directed theater, “is not interested in the directionality of the camera, so we won’t act in just one direction.”
In a telephone interview, Johan Simons – artistic director of the Schauspielhaus Bochum theater in western Germany and a frequent collaborator of Hüller – pointed out a sign of her maturity as an actress in a scene from “The Zone of Interest” where her character grooms him with a fur coat taken from a Jewish victim. “I think all the other actors would try to move the audience, to make them understand this person,” he said. “But Sandra plays her as a woman with no depth or real feelings, because she doesn’t even try for a second to be vain.”
“She’s always aware that what she does is in service of something bigger,” Simons added. “She knows where she comes from.”
Born in the small town of Friedrichroda when it was still part of East Germany, Hüller was 11 when the Berlin Wall fell and developed an interest in acting while watching American television, including “The A-Team” and “MacGyver.” . After finishing high school, he moved to Berlin and enrolled in an acting school heavily influenced by Stanislavski’s method acting. (“I don’t really know what that means,” he said matter-of-factly. “I skipped all the theory courses.”)
Hüller “didn’t really like living in Berlin,” he said, and after graduating, he left the city to join the permanent acting ensemble of the state-funded theater in Jena, near his hometown, and then the theaters of Basel, Switzerland. ; Munich; and Bochum.
Over the past two decades she has earned a reputation as one of Germany’s most creative stage actresses. The country’s state-funded system, in which theaters hire artists as permanent employees, allowed Hüller a steady income and, she said, taught her the importance of humility and teamwork.
“It’s a community,” he said. “If you see your dresser every day for years, you can’t just throw things in front of it.” She has applied a similar philosophy when choosing her film roles, explaining that she only worked with directors who allowed a collaborative approach and “didn’t turn actors into objects or test subjects.”
This philosophy explains his ambivalent vision of his current situation. Hüller said she was horrified that journalists had tried to contact her family and her schoolmates to talk about her. “People think you belong to everyone or that you have a duty to the public,” she said. “I can not control it”.
He also worried that his sudden fame might overshadow the work of his colleagues. Hüller noted with concern that the actions of “The exterminating angel”, a stage adaptation of the Luis Buñuel film in which she participates, had begun to sell out after its Oscar nomination, after months of having less attendance. She guessed that many audience members had bought tickets just to see her. “Of course, my teammates know what happened. But we developed it together,” she said. “That makes me sad.”
However, he said he was considering how best to take advantage of the attention. She planned to make her debut as a stage director next year in the eastern German city of Halle, and she was also “reading a lot of scripts” for new acting projects. She tartly noted that many of them focused on “marital conflicts” in which she would play a “darker figure,” similar to her role in “Anatomy of a Fall.” She predicted that “more interesting things will come.”
That could include something further afield, he said, maybe even an action movie. In addition to her opposition to Nazi films, she said that she was opposed to any project that “eroticized the gun,” but added, mischievously, that as a child she was a “great marksman” with air guns.
Whatever you do, expectations will be higher than before. “I’ve realized that what I love most about my job is quietly working on something, then showing it off, and then finishing,” she said. “That is not possible anymore. I have understood it.”