Sandra Hüller, the new star of European cinema, capable of embodying characters hated by the public

The same song links, like a chain through decades and continents, the careers of a heavyweight champion, a huge soul singer, the queen of pop and a German actress. The Greatest Love of All was composed for Me the best, he biopic by Muhammad Ali, the most famous boxer in history, which Ali himself starred in in 1977, and in that first version it was sung and popularized by George Benson. Eight years later, without the article the From the beginning, Whitney Houston included it on her debut album and with it it burst the music charts. Finally, Inés, the character in Toni Erdman With which Sandra Hüller (Suhl, 45 years old) achieved fame, a German executive who works in Bucharest and who is completely destabilized by her father’s visit, she sings it captivatingly in the middle of the footage. Until then, Inés behaves like one more gray manager, focused on meaningless work. And at a house party, With her father at the piano, placed by him between a rock and a hard place, Inés starts to sing Greatest Love of All, blowing up his slab of boredom. For Hüller, known until then in her country and somewhat on the festival circuit, nothing remained the same either. Now a star of European cinema, she has appeared in two of the most commented films at the last Cannes festival, where she also won the two most important awards: anatomy of a fall (Palme d’Or) and the area of ​​interest (Grand Jury Prize). Hüller reigned on La Croisette.

“Interestingly, being in two films at Cannes takes a lot of the pressure off of being in one,” he told the promotion during the festival. Although its dramatic weight is greater in the French anatomy of a fall —and she even replied that if she was awarded, she preferred it to be for this— than in the British The area of ​​interest Hüller cared for both films equally until the closing ceremony itself, in which he participated on the red carpet of the first one with his colleagues and the director Justine Triet, entered the Palais des Festivals, reached his seat and went out again through one side of the access staircase to repeat the walk with the team led by the filmmaker Jonathan Glazer. In the previous days, both the French and the British came to see the projections of Hüller’s other films, and the German interpreter escaped to a session of Club Zero, by Jessica Hausner, a director with whom he worked on Love Fou (2014): the actress has always defined cinema as an act of solidarity.

In both films, their characters benefit from their talent for embodying cold women, emotionally removed from the public’s sympathy, surly and sometimes enigmatic. Hüller, who had already worked with Triet in Sibyl’s reflection (2019) giving life to a dictatorial filmmaker, capable of using even the betrayal of her lover, the leading actor, for the good of the film they are shooting, accepted the character that Triet proposed to him for the first time. Anatomy of a fall that of a writer who swallows everything that happens around her to write autofiction, and who is accused of the death (the fall of the title) of her husband. It took her much longer to sign with Glazer, because in the area of ​​interest gives life to Hedwig Höss, the wife of the commander of the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz, a woman fully aware of her husband’s work, happy to raise her family among privileges and who lives without the noise that the Nazi murderous machinery causes to the world. other side of the wall of his garden (the crematorium ovens, the shouts and the shots) upset him. “In the end, I realized that it was very cowardly to hide behind the fact that I hated her so much that I couldn’t play her,” she explained in Cannes, and her interest in working with a star director of auteur cinema won her over, despite the fact that she only I would have made three films before.

For The area of ​​interest Glazer hid numerous micro-cameras around the set, allowing the actors freedom in their movements while forcing them to stay inside their characters for four weeks in the summer of 2021. “It was funny, because I felt that freedom as an actress, but I think my character never was: someone who is carried away by hate will never be free”, he told in Los Angeles Times. “I managed to connect with her in her doubts about her appearance and her insecurity about her social class.” Her Sandra (her name is) from anatomy of a fall It is something else, although the Latino public will feel it in a very different way from the Nordics: it is a woman who does not smile constantly, who emphasizes the facts while considering the emotions private, although that could send her to jail: “She is not cold, simply He wastes no time in pleasing.”

For Hüller, Glazer is an “extraordinary human being, with enormous vulnerability” who refuses, despite her formal precision, to confine her cast inside, and Trier, with whom she has been friends since their second job together, shot last summer. past, “an open mind, a fascinating energy” that he admires “for its freedom”.

But this whole wave arose in 2016 with Toni Erdman. Hüller was born in Suhl, in Thuringia, in 1978. At the age of 18 he moved to Berlin to study theater at the prestigious Ernst Busch School of Performing Arts. He returned to his region in 1999, and for two seasons he performed at the Jena theater. And when she finished she traveled to Switzerland, where she worked in the basel theater until 2006. There he began his career in the cinema, and he did it in a big way, in Requiem (2006), with which she won the award for best actress at the Berlinale that year, thanks to her role as an epileptic girl destroyed by religious fanaticism and ignorance of her surroundings. In her professional escalation, in 2012 she received all kinds of congratulations with Über uns das All, but it was Toni Erdmann, of Maren Ade, and her successful passage through Cannes with which Hüller achieved great status, and the award for best actress in European cinema, while personally she decided to live in Leipzig. “I get lost in cities like Berlin or Munich. That size scares me, it creates unhappiness in me. The good thing about theater is that after working you go home and sleep in your bed”.

From Toni Erdmann, Despite his desire for a quiet life, he has shot all kinds of films throughout the continent: the third installment of the German comic saga Fuck you, teacher! (2017), the heartbreaking Just around the corner (2018), the drama with astronauts next (2019) or another vision of Empress Sisi in Sisi & Ich (2023): “I do not discriminate against secondary characters or protagonists. I’ve had unpleasant experiences on filming in my career, and for me, the hard part is when people don’t respect you, lie to you or steal information to manipulate you because they don’t trust you. That is hard.”