Driving Mr Mann: Sandra Hüller takes the wheel in Fatherland
Sandra Hüller looks resplendent in Cannes, wearing a pink Chanel skirt and jacket. I tell her she looks fantastic and she replies, “You too”, in her no-nonsense manner.
The 48-year-old German actress has had quite a year, appearing alongside Ryan Gosling in Project Hail Mary and as Tom Cruise’s half-sister and business partner in Digger, and she won the Berlin Film Festival’s Silver Bear for best leading performance in the Austrian-German feature Rose, directed by Austria’s Markus Schleinzer.
In December she will appear in Marvel’s Avengers: Doomsday.
This all comes after her break-out role in the 2016 German father-daughter comedy Toni Erdmann and her rise to international fame in two 2023 Cannes films – as a woman who may have killed her husband in the French film, Anatomy of a Fall (she was Oscar-nominated for best actress) and the Holocaust drama, The Zone of Interest.
We are meeting to discuss Fatherland, one of her smaller European projects, where she plays Erika Mann, the daughter and assistant of the German Nobel prize-winning author, Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler).
The film follows them travelling together in a black Buick across a war-torn, divided Germany in the summer of 1949 so he can accept the Goethe Prize in Frankfurt and go on to visit Weimar in the East to receive the Goethe National Prize.
(Mann actually made the trip with his wife Katia and not Erika, who here drives the car and acts as his filter against the outside world. Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski changed events to emphasise the family dynamic and Mann’s inner conflicts.)
Fatherland marks Pawlikowski’s third film in his European trilogy after 2013’s Ida and 2018’s Cold War. The refreshingly short, concise film took out a directing award in Cannes and looks set to figure in the upcoming awards season.
“I don’t think in terms of films being big and small. I think in terms of interesting and not interesting,” says Hüller.
“When a character isn’t rich on paper, I can’t make it rich. It has to be written like this. I think there’s a misconception of what I’m capable of. I can only bring characters to life when they have this life, so in Erika’s case I found there was a lot going on inside of her.”
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Openly bisexual, Erika Mann was a bestselling author, war correspondent, cabaret performer and rally driver. Even when the Germans cancelled her citizenship, she continued to attack Nazism in her work and eventually moved to the US to support her exiled parents.
“Erika had a lot of life experience, she was very smart and very bold,” notes Hüller. “She had a wild life with her brother Klaus (August Diehl). She was provocative and angry, and she didn’t shy away from a fight with her father.
“I wouldn’t say she was fearless, but she knew how to overcome fear, or I would even say she practiced it, because I think this meant freedom to her, to not be limited by your own ideas of what is not possible.
“So that was very much present all the time while we were working, even if in the story that Pawel and Henk (co-writer Henk Handloegten) have invented, there was not so much space to actually act that out.”
In the film, Mann returns to his homeland for the first time in 16 years and is grappling with the idea of a fractured, post-war Germany as his fatherland.
He receives anonymous letters accusing him of betraying the fatherland, while also facing warnings that engaging too much with the East will alienate him from the US he adopted.
‘There is a big difference between the life that I lead in my personal space and the life that is projected on me’
Does Hüller have a sense of Germany as the fatherland?
“Actually, I don’t like to use the word fatherland, because I don’t understand why it’s not called motherland,” she replies.
Born and raised in the former East, Hüller now lives with her teenage daughter in Leipzig.
“Leipzig has all the possibilities of Berlin,” she says. “It is also a really big city, but it somehow managed to stay calm. And I like that.
“I’m very connected to Thuringia, where I grew up, so it’s more that little state or that landscape that I’m connected to, but I don’t know if I’m very connected to Germany. Now I’m lucky enough to travel and see the world and I feel more like a world citizen.”
There’s no doubting that her career has skyrocketed of late, though she has mixed feelings about her fame.
“It changes every day and I adjust,” she says. “There is a big difference between the life that I lead in my personal space and the life that is projected on me. So I try to deal with the tension between the two. I’ve always been surrounded by interesting projects and that has not changed. It’s just maybe more visible.”
She says being around the Hollywood machine with Cruise on Digger was “interesting to watch”, as was working on Project Hail Mary.
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In terms of awards it seems she might receive most attention for Rose, in which she plays the title role of a woman living her life as a man, a soldier who returns from the 17th century Thirty Years’ War to run a farm.
An Oscar nomination for best actress seems likely for her performance. For her role she studied male gestures, wore padding as well as a fake penis, a so-called horn. Ultimately, though, she thought more about male power.
“There are many historical examples of dressing as men in order to have more power,” she says.
Interestingly, the film, like Fatherland, is historical and both were filmed in black-and-white. She says her Berlin award for Rose meant a lot on a personal level.
“I received my first Berlin Bear for Requiem 20 years ago, and that was my first prize for acting ever, so I was very grateful that I’m still there and I’m still working.”
Hüller was not surprised that Project Hail Mary became a huge success.
“The studios give you little hints about what they expect this to be in the end,” she says of the film, for which she may be Oscar-nominated for supporting actress.
What came as a surprise to audiences was her ability to sing in the film, where she performs Harry Styles’ Sign of the Times just as Gosling’s astronaut is about to head into space.
Gosling had heard her singing in her dressing room and had urged directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller to write a song for her scientist character. But Hüller would only agree if she could pick the track.
After looking for goodbye songs and consulting her daughter she selected Harry Styles’ 2017 hit. Gosling knows Styles and helped make it happen.
“Of course, it becomes the anthem of the film,” Gosling said on CBS Mornings. “Sandra’s the most fun person I’ve worked with. You couldn’t ask for a better partner.”
Hüller only had a day to prepare to sing.
“It was like being pushed off a bridge and we didn’t rehearse,” she recalled on TV’s Late Night with Seth Meyers, noting it was like doing karaoke and that she was “really, really scared”.
As well as being highlighted on prominent US talk shows, the song has been widely circulated on social media, which means Hüller is not only gaining recognition as an actress, but as a singer.
Certainly, Hüller has arrived and the world is watching.
Fatherland releases in cinemas on November 12. Rose will release in 2027.
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