Sandra Hüller on Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest & What’s Next

Warning: spoilers ahead for Anatomy of a Fall.

In German actress Sandra Hüller's nightmares, she mixes up the two highly acclaimed movies she's been promoting for months now. That hasn't happened in real life so far, but it's also certain Hüller will be talking about these films for a long while.

Hüller stars in both Anatomy of a Fall and A24’s The Zone of Interest, which won the Palme d'Or and the Grand Prix, essentially first and second prize at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, respectively. In the former, directed by Justine Triet, she plays a novelist who is accused of murdering her husband after he plummets to his death from their chalet in the French Alps; in the latter, from Jonathan Glazer, she's the wife of the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, blithely ignoring the horrors next door. By the end of 2023, she's likely to be one of the most praised performers of the year, and could very well be nominated for an Oscar.

It's a moment that the 45-year-old is taking in stride. Hollywood has turned its eye to her before, after her work in the acclaimed comedy about a woman and her eccentric father, Toni Erdmann. "It's really flattering," Hüller says over Zoom the day before Anatomy's New York Film Festival premiere. "I like it. It's exciting. At the same time, it happened before and nothing came out of it."

This confluence of attention comes after a period of intense work, filming three projects back to back from the summer of 2021 through the spring of 2022. In between Zone and Anatomy, she made Sisi & I, playing a handmaiden to Empress Elisabeth of Austria in the 19th Century. "All the three characters have nothing in common. But I had to find my way and connect them, so I would know where I would stop at this project and where I would begin at this project."

With Anatomy, where she ended, she tackled a character, named Sandra as well, who is a "perfect example of a grown woman who knows what she does, who knows about the things people think about her, about the projections on her, but at the same time about her own reasons to do things and to be totally fine with the consequences of her actions." To Hüller, Sandra is someone "who does things the way I would probably love to do them, but can't yet." Despite that self-deprecation, it was a role written with her in mind.

In Anatomy, the audience meets Sandra as she's being interviewed by a younger female student. Sandra is charming, almost flirtatious, but deferring the questions about her real life connection to her work. Then, her husband Samuel (Samuel Theis) upstairs starts blasting music. The interview is cut short. Later that day, Samuel is dead. With the cause of death inconclusive, Sandra, who maintains her innocence, is indicted for his murder.

Over the course of the film, Sandra—as well as her marriage and family—come under a microscope and Hüller offers a portrait of a woman, flawed but fascinating, who finds her every word turned against her. From the moment Hüller read the script, she was captivated, and she couldn't stop turning it over in her head. "The movement that I noticed in myself toward Sandra and away from Sandra, believing her, feeling uncomfortable with her, loving her at points, admiring her, being afraid of her, thinking maybe she's done it, all these things were so special to me that drew me to it," she says.

Anatomy of a Fall does not offer any clear answer as to whether Sandra committed the crime for which she is charged, nor does it ever actually show the moment in which Samuel plunged to his death. And Hüller was mostly okay with not knowing these details either, except for one instance, just before shooting, when she panicked and asked Triet for an explanation. Triet didn't answer, and that was fine. In fact, Hüller chose not to figure out whether Sandra was responsible.

"I never really decided anyway," Hüller says. "I wanted her to be a person that could do it. I wanted her to be a dangerous woman. We don't see that very often and why not?"

In addition to the tricky, essentially unknowable nature of the character she was required to play, Anatomy also posed another challenge for Hüller, who performs the film entirely in English and French—not German, her natural tongue. It's a detail that's relevant to the plot—Sandra on screen is also German, but she speaks English with her French husband and is required to testify in French, occasionally stumbling over her words. Hüller calls the language flipping like "sports for the brain," but it was also in some ways freeing. "When I work in other languages, it adds, of course a certain layer to it, but also a kind of filter to what's going on all the time," she says. "Whereas, when I work in German, I am much more obsessed with details than I am in French or English. So it's kind of liberating to work in another language, I love it very much."

Despite her incredible year, Hüller is somewhat ambivalent about what's to come. "There's no project on the table," she says. "I have these two films to talk about for weeks, and I'm happy about it, happy to do it, happy to explore. All these things are really really good, but I don't know anything about the future."

Anatomy of a Fall is now playing in select theaters.

The Zone of Interest premieres in the US on December 15, 2023.