Sandra Hüller's 2026 is an accident of release schedules that reads like a career retrospective. Four films — two black-and-white arthouse productions (Fatherland, Rose), one catastrophic Iñárritu misfire (Digger), and one $684 million crowd-pleaser (Project Hail Mary) — landed in the same calendar year not because Hüller planned a statement but because she kept saying yes to interesting directors and the math caught up with her. There may also be a fifth film: Marvel's Avengers: Doomsday, which she neither confirms nor denies with an impish tilt of the head that is, itself, a performance. The interview's emotional center is Fatherland, Paweł Pawlikowski's film in which Hüller plays Erika Mann, daughter of Thomas Mann, driving her novelist father through newly divided postwar Germany. Hüller grew up in East Germany — she still lives in what was once the GDR — and the film carries a grief she says is specifically Eastern. She cries during the interview when she describes it. 'I'm just grateful Pawel gave space to this political idea that didn't survive in Germany, but is one maybe people can still think about. The socialist idea.' The tears are not a performance. They are the opposite: a lapse in the self-possession that defines almost everything she does. On the subject of the AfD — whose 43.8% vote share in Saxony-Anhalt forms the backdrop to Rose, filmed in that state — Hüller is direct without being theatrical. 'Fascism doesn't arrive overnight. It gets here slowly, in little doses.' She connects this to the Mann family's 1933 exile, to the utopian dreams of the GDR, and to the uncomfortable present. What's striking is the structural thinking: she sees systems, their lifespans, their failure modes. 'No system is for ever. And that is interesting in a time when the things we've done so long don't work any more.' Project Hail Mary is genuinely interesting as a data point. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller cast Hüller as Eva Stratt, a stone-faced mission controller — a role that let her use the very quality that makes her unusual: ultra-competence that reads as unsettling rather than reassuring. 'I think Eva Stratt made some people uncomfortable. It can feel unusual to be governed by a woman.' The film hit $684 million. Hüller found the blockbuster machinery disorienting — she doesn't even have an assistant — but she liked that the directors 'made sure we could actually play.' She hid in the bathroom when producers tried to track her location. Digger is the year's cautionary tale. Alejandro González Iñárritu's film with Tom Cruise as a cartoonish oil tycoon got poor reviews and collapsed at the box office. Hüller loved it and thinks history will vindicate it as a document of the times. She is also clearly aware that her role was heavily cut — 'Well, there was [more of me]' — and declines to discuss Iñárritu's decisions directly. The royal gala premiere, during which she had to stand in a red carpet frock while the audience watched Prince William and Catherine's introductions for hours, is recalled with the comic timing of someone who has learned to metabolize absurdity. Her feet hurt. She was also, she admits, fangirling. The portrait that emerges is of someone who holds genuinely incompatible things together without forcing resolution. She is a co-founder of an experimental theatre collective (Farn Kollektiv) and possibly the next Avengers film. She considers herself an ensemble player who gives the highest praise as 'part of a group' and is simultaneously the common thread that Hollywood marketing budgets use to spotlight arthouse cinema. She prepared for Rose — in which she plays a woman passing as male in a 17th-century war fable — by watching men enter rooms and realizing they scan for enemies. 'Male behaviour is so related to that. Where is the enemy and how can I defeat him?' Her German stage career is now on hold because fame has made it complicated. She lives in Leipzig. America is just very far away.
