All ‘Hail’ Sandra Hüller: Hollywood doesn’t deserve her
If you are one of the hundreds of millions of people who went to the cinema to watch Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s space escapade Project Hail Mary, you probably left the theatre feeling warm and fuzzy about intergalactic bromance. If not, you were probably thinking about Sandra Hüller and wondering why she wasn’t the star.
The film is not about the ground crew, of course. It’s about Ryan Gosling and the lonely pile of rocks that he befriends while trying to save the solar system from a sun-murdering cloud of amoebas. But every time Hüller is on screen as the head of the project’s task force, the movie kicks up a notch. It’s not that her character is particularly well written or that the action takes place on Earth (far from it); it’s that Hüller is one of those rare performers who makes you want to follow her wherever she chooses to go.
In recent years, audiences have followed her across vast distances in tone, genre, and character, from her turn as a humourless corporate consultant who is disarmed by her whimsical father in the 2016 comedy Toni Erdmann, to the wife of a Nazi concentration camp commandant in the 2023 Oscar-winning drama The Zone of Interest.
She can be dishing out deadpan humour one minute and be downright blood-curdling the next. Unlike many movie stars, whose thousand-watt smiles and wrinkle-less faces make them perpetually advert-ready, Hüller can shape-shift from being a nondescript face in the crowd to a magnetic vortex of charisma.
This range was on full display in the 2023 drama Anatomy of a Fall, in which she played an author who is on trial for the mysterious death of her husband. The film takes a gamble by zeroing in on the character without offering answers, and it’s difficult to imagine any other actor pulling it off so successfully.
The juxtaposition of the character’s screaming arguments with her husband and her circumspect, even demure, courtroom testimony is a masterclass in acting without ever giving off the showiness that most actors would. In fact, the only reason she didn’t win the Oscar that year is that the Academy usually goes for the showiest option, which, that year, was Emma Stone in Poor Things.
There is a risk involved in being a virtuosic European actor who catches the fickle attention of Hollywood. As has been shown time and again, such stars are often courted by big-name directors and then relegated to challenging but teeny supporting roles that call upon their skills as character actors but not on their aptitude for carrying an entire film and making it significantly better than it has any right to be.
This is the case with Project Hail Mary, of course. Hüller lands a disproportionate number of punchlines, brings the proceedings to a standstill with a karaoke rendition of Harry Styles’s ‘Sign of the Times’, and commits an unforgivable act while still making it reasonable to hope that she and Gosling might become an item when he gets back to his home planet. And yet, she remains a side character who is stuck on Earth while the boys get cosy in space. Like Rebecca Ferguson and Mads Mikkelsen in all of their Hollywood ventures, she’s the best actor in the cast but is somehow still pushed onto the sidelines.
The same fate may await her in the upcoming Alejandro G Iñárritu film, Digger. The plot and characters remain under wraps, but Tom Cruise is in it, which means that there will be very little oxygen for anyone else. He’s a primary offender of this phenomenon. It’s not all doom and gloom, though. She is also set to star in Pawel Pawlikowski’s upcoming historical drama, Fatherland, about Thomas Mann’s stand against the Nazi regime. Surely the director who brought us such humanistic tour de forces as Ida and Cold War will not squander the opportunity to showcase Hüller in her full glory.
As much as she deserves to be a movie star on par with Cruise or Margot Robbie and win as many Oscars as Cate Blanchett or Emma Stone, Hüller’s best course of action is to follow in the footsteps of fellow European actors like Stellan Skarsgård, Isabelle Huppert, and Penelope Cruz.
They have made plenty of movies in Hollywood, but they continue to take on complex, meaty roles in European arthouse movies that are actually worthy of them. As Anatomy of a Fall proved, her talents are so undeniable that she might just end up converting mainstream American audiences to independent European movies once and for all.
