Sandra Hüller: four films, four directors, one impossible year

Sandra Hüller

Photo: Martin Kraft / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	April 30, 1978 Suhl, Thuringia, Germany
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Project Hail Mary, Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest
Awards	2 Silver Bear · European Film · César · Academy Award

The question nobody has quite figured out how to ask Sandra Hüller is this: how do you keep disappearing when everyone keeps finding you?

She has spent the first half of 2026 doing something that hasn’t really been done in contemporary European cinema — releasing, in the space of months, four films that are not variations on a theme but four genuinely different kinds of movies: a Berlinale drama about disguised identity that earned her a second Silver Bear; a Hollywood sci-fi in which she trades dialogue with Ryan Gosling while humanity hangs in the balance; a Cannes competition film from Paweł Pawlikowski in which she plays Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas, as a woman made of fury and precision; and, coming in October, a $125 million black comedy with Tom Cruise. The year is not over.

She grew up in Suhl, a city in Thuringia that was then East Germany, and in the forest villages of Oberhof and Friedrichroda, far from any film industry. Her father taught at a training center; her mother gave after-school tutoring. She was eleven when the Berlin Wall fell, old enough to register the fear on adult faces as a system dissolved overnight. She studied at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin, graduating in 2003, and spent the years that followed at theaters in Jena, Leipzig, and Basel — developing roles, not a profile.

The film that made critics elsewhere stop was Requiem, Hans-Christian Schmid’s 2006 drama about a devout young woman whose family interprets her epilepsy as demonic possession. Hüller’s portrayal of Michaela Klingler — simultaneously desperate for transcendence and ground down by institutional failure — was so precise it won her the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlinale. A less alert actor might have played the role as pathology. Hüller played it as faith, which is harder and more unsettling.

A decade passed before the world caught up with what German theater-goers already knew. Toni Erdmann, Maren Ade’s 2016 comedy about a prankster father who invades his daughter’s smooth corporate life in Bucharest, was named the best film of the year by more than a dozen critics’ groups and placed Hüller at the center of an argument about what contemporary screen acting could do. Her Ines Conradi — tight-wound, competent, quietly undone by her father’s refusal to respect her carefully constructed distance — was the film’s structural engine. The European Film Award for Best Actress followed. The Palme d’Or did not: Toni Erdmann was the most debated film at Cannes that year and went home without the prize, which remains one of the more discussed festival decisions of recent memory.

What happened in 2023 was, by any measure, not supposed to be possible. Two films, two directors, two radically different approaches — both nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture in the same ceremony. In Justine Triet’s Anatomy of a Fall, Hüller played Sandra Voyter, a novelist on trial for the suspected murder of her husband, in a performance built almost entirely on withholding: the audience never fully knows whether the character is guilty, and Hüller never quite lets us decide. The film won the Palme d’Or. She won the César for Best Actress. She became the first German actress nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress since Luise Rainer in 1937. In Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, her role was the deliberate opposite of the heroic: Hedwig Höss, wife of the Auschwitz commandant, managing her garden and her children with focused domesticity while what happened outside her perimeter wall went unacknowledged. The film’s refusal to grant its audience the catharsis of visible horror divided criticism sharply. Some called it one of the most morally serious films made about the Holocaust. Others argued that Hüller’s portrayal of Hedwig as comfortable and untroubled rather than monstrous made complicity too humanly legible — too easy, in some readings, to understand and thus too easy to extend sympathy toward. The debate is unresolved, which may be the point.

Her daughter was born in 2011. She lives in Leipzig-Plagwitz. She co-founded a theater collective, FARN, and made her directorial debut on stage in April 2025. She is, among other things, a licensed forklift operator. None of this is the career of someone managing an image.

Digger, her fourth major 2026 release, is a satirical black comedy with Tom Cruise and a budget that represents a kind of scale Hüller has never worked at before. Whether that scale changes anything about the way she inhabits a role, or whether it bends to her approach instead, is the open question that makes the rest of 2026 worth following.