The Oscar-nominated German actress Sandra Hüller was the guest for a special episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast that was recorded last Friday at the Cannes Film Festival in front of an audience in the Campari Lounge within the Palais. Best known for 2016’s Toni Erdmann and 2023’s Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, all of which premiered in Cannes, the 48-year-old was back on the Croisette in the midst of a year unlike any other.

Indeed, Hüller has given three major performances in 2026. In February, she won Berlin’s lead acting award for her portrayal of a 17th-century woman passing as a man in Markus Schleinzer’s Rose. March brought the blockbuster Project Hail Mary, a sci-fi dramedy in which she goes toe-to-toe with Ryan Gosling as the world hangs in the balance. And she is now garnering raves in Cannes for her turn as German writer Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika, in Paweł Pawlikowski’s competition film Fatherland.

Oh, and she has yet another big project still to come in the fall: Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger, a $125 million satirical black comedy in which she stars opposite one Tom Cruise. “I am nearly bursting wanting to talk about this movie,” she said, “But I can’t. I legally can’t. I can say that I saw a version that’s maybe not the final version, and that it impresses me beyond anything I’ve ever seen. I think it’s going to be a remarkable film.”

Over the course of the conversation, which you can hear in its entirety via the audio player above or any major podcast app, Hüller marveled at the fact that she is in films at all. She started acting in her teens after a teacher encouraged her to join a drama club, and only ever dreamed of working on the stage. But her acclaimed theater work led to her big-screen debut 20 years ago in Requiem, playing a woman whose epileptic seizures convince her family she has been possessed, and she won Berlin’s best actress prize, after which there was no turning back. “I consider myself a theater actress still,” she explained. “It’s just a coincidence that I’ve somehow got into film.”

Requiem and, a decade later, Toni Erdmann, grew Hüller’s profile. But she didn’t become an internationally known star until the double-header of Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest, which, in the same year, won Cannes’ first-place and second-place prizes, respectively, and both went on to best picture Oscar nominations, the first time two non-English-language films landed in the top category in the same year. For her part, Hüller became the first person to receive two noms in the same year for the best actress European Film Award, and BAFTA noms for best actress and best supporting actress. She also became, for Anatomy, the first German best actress Oscar nominee since Luise Rainer in 1938.

During this recording, Hüller shared that she had not known what sort of role she was being asked to play when she first met on The Zone of Interest, and had to think long and hard before deciding to break her longstanding rule of not playing Nazis. She explained how she approached Anatomy of a Fall, as far as the innocence or guilt of her character. She talked about covering hit songs a decade apart in Toni Erdmann (Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All”) and Project Hail Mary (Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times”), and the importance of those scenes to the films in which they are featured. And she said of Fatherland, “I think I learned the most, of every film, on this one.”