Words MAYA SINGER
Photography PAOLO ROVERSI
Styling ROBBIE SPENCER
Starring SANDRA HÜLLER

Three years after starring in arthouse hits The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall, Germany's leading lady SANDRA HÜLLER is out to save the world, flexing her deadpan skills in big-budget existential comedies opposite Ryan Gosling and Tom Cruise. Preoccupied with power, patience, and philosophy, she finds her funny bone and reminds us all of the unexpected humour in despair.

SANDRA HÜLLER IS NOT FUNNY. That's according to Sandra Hüller. We're eating lunch, fast, at a photo studio in a far-flung pocket of Paris where, minutes earlier, I'd been watching the heralded German actress level a queenly, unblinking gaze at the camera lens, and unfurl a Dior cape like a pair of wings, as if she were about to fly back home to Mount Olympus. Now, de-glammed, Hüller, 47, is shaking her head at her lasagne, refusing to budge on this point: much as she loves comedy, it's just not her thing. “Real comics, geniuses like Kristen Wiig or Steve Carell, with that quickness—there's almost a madness to it. That's not me," she says with a shrug. "I can be silly at home, in my life, but in my work, I'm more drawn to...darker places."

That Hüller errs towards the dark will not surprise anyone introduced to her via The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall, her double-whammy of Cannes Film Festival- and Academy Award-winning films released in 2023. In the former, Hüller is—just is—the wife of the commandant of Auschwitz. Clunky. Preening. Vapid. Haunting. Her role in Anatomy, on the other hand, conceived by cowriter/director Justine Triet with Hüller in mind, is one of cinema's most complex depictions of a modern woman, with Hüller playing a well-known writer whose marriage, morals, and suitability as a mother—indeed, her every statement, gesture, and life choice—are held up for public scrutiny when she's tried for the murder of her husband. Tricky parts, these— and comical, in the sense that Hüller's acting embraces the whole human comedy, all that's absurd and unsettling and wonderful and stupid about being alive.

So, yes, Hüller has tended to paint la comédie humaine in darker colours. But now she is making her first foray into Hollywood and trying her hand at something lighter: Project Hail Mary, a sci-fi flick costarring Ryan Gosling. It's a film about the world ending. Hahahahaha.

“I mean, we're all dealing with the possibility of a man-made apocalypse—it makes sense to think about it in a cinematic way,” Hüller notes of the film, which is based on a novel by Andy Weir (The Martian). As sci-fi writers go, Weir is grounded and pragmatic, and the way Hüller sees it, Project Hail Mary sidesteps despair by being solution-oriented. Something up in the sky is dimming the sun, and the people in this film are going to find the fix, led by Eva Stratt, “the most powerful figure in the world”, in Hüller's compact description of her character. A key decision Stratt makes is to shoot Dr Ryland Grace, played by Gosling, into space. His reluctance to go takes on near-screwball dimensions; meanwhile, the fate of the planet is at stake. “She has a lot of patience with him, as he's going in all directions all the time," says Hüller of Stratt, the film's high-minded straight man to Gosling's goofball, Grace. "Maybe she'd like to be funny. But no, no humour. And she knows it. But she's ruling the world, so who cares? She has a lot of responsibility. She can't be making jokes."

There's always a gap between actors and the characters they play. With Hüller, an actress gifted with near-total emotional transparency and seemingly infinite expressive range, the jolting difference, upon meeting, is her impassivity. It's as if she's been supplied with a limited lifetime quantity of feeling, and as she expends so much of it on her work, the rest must be kept in reserve. She's not icy, but she's not warm. Not right off the bat. Her manner is frank. “Watchful neutrality” is how I'd describe it; this seems to be her default mode with strangers, and maybe in general. Hüller has said in the past that acting is, in essence, a vessel for her watchfulness, though this wasn't something she understood when she joined the drama club at her high school in Thuringia. "It was one of those realisations you have later: ah, this is what I like—it's watching, registering, more than it is the showing." This may be the key, or a key, to Hüller's genius: her disinclination to show. Face-to-face, she refuses to perform herself or to react just to react; when she does laugh, it's like the sudden pealing of a bell. And then, bit by bit, she opens. Just a crack. In this regard, Hüller the interlocutor is identical to Hüller the actress. No bells and whistles. An unforced, matter-of-fact, moment-by-moment unveiling.

Of course, that isn't very "Hollywood". Hüller is grateful to Project Hail Mary directors Chris Miller and Phil Lord (The Lego Movie and the Spider-Verse films) for not pushing her to change her "arthouse" style. "It's a muscle," she says, speaking about the practice of popcorn-flick acting. "You watch Ryan, his ease, his presence, the way he improvises—it's so different from what I'm used to. I haven't been using this muscle. But you can make this 'weakness' into a strength. Chris and Phil let me stay in that space, my space, and I think that created a good tension between my character and Ryan's character. People coming from very different worlds."

Hüller prepared for her part in Project Hail Mary the same way she prepares for all her roles: by "walking around" with her character, contemplating Eva Stratt, putting her into her body. ("I have a lot of friends," she notes.) To play Hedwig Höss in Zone, she stayed aloof from the character's interiority and focused on her plodding, wide-hipped walk; creating Eva, Hüller says, she focused on a sense of calm.

"I was thinking about people who I wanted to be governed by. And I wanted them to be very, very calm, and thoughtful, and caring, and tender, and serious, and responsible,” Hüller says, listing attributes that do not describe many current world leaders. She palms a circle in the air over her waist. "That's centred somewhere, all that. A core. Also, she would not gesture a lot—she would be centred, and settled, and speak in a calm way."

Talking about Project Hail Mary and the sci-fi genre in general, Hüller goes off on an unexpected tangent. "I wonder when people will start to include authors like Donna Haraway—like, really go to the development of humanity and all creatures. We think about it, and we talk about it..." What Hüller is referring to here, in a general way, is feminist/scientist Professor Haraway's "Chthulucene" concept for the current era, wherein plants, animals, man, and machine are considered, in effect, one organism. "I guess it means we would have to have more empathy," she continues. “I would feel the pain of the fly, the pain of the mosquito. It's a demanding philosophy. Maybe people don't have so much time for demanding philosophies right now. It's more that they keep saying to us that empathy is going away."

A notable aspect of Hüller's Eva Stratt—and a quality you don't see much in world rulers off-screen or on, now or ever—is that she is kind. Useful, if you want to stop the world from freezing over.

Shooting a big-budget Hollywood film was eye-opening for Hüller. She still seems somewhat agog about the elaborate sets, the numbers of extras, the giant crew, the insane locations “like an air-craft carrier”, and the corporate, clockwork organisation of the production. Her sense of "Whoa!" persists even after she's wrapped a second major Hollywood outing, Digger, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu and starring Tom Cruise. This film is also about someone on a mission to save the world—and it, too, is a comedy. "Otherwise they're very different," Hüller notes. (Beyond that, regarding Digger, out this October, her lips remain sealed.)

In any case, Hüller will soon be returning to screens in the kinds of films and roles she's best known for. In 1949/Vaterland, for example—director Pawel Pawlikowski's follow-up to Ida and Cold War—she stars as Erika Mann, daughter of novelist Thomas Mann, in a story about their return to Germany after the second world war. Rose, debuting in competition at this year's Berlinale, has Hüller playing a "mysterious" 17th-century soldier—in drag. And, along with today's photo shoot, Hüller's agenda in Paris includes a meeting with Justine Triet to discuss their next film together. Give or take a few magazine covers, fashion campaigns, and Hollywood blockbusters, Hüller insists her life hasn't really changed. "I still live in the same flat, I go home to the same people, I wash the same dishes," she states. When she wants a giggle, she and her daughter turn on Gosling's The Fall Guy. They've watched it countless times, Hüller says. "That's funny."

Here's the thing: Hüller is funny. She's funny in Sibyl (2019), her first film with Triet, and she's funny in the pitch-black period piece Sisi & I (2023), and in her dead-serious way, she's hilarious in Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann (2016), the first film that earned her international renown. In the latter, she plays a workaholic consultant abetting the spread of capitalist exploitation through the Eurozone—who is also the put-upon daughter of a pathological prankster. It's a matter of some controversy whether Toni Erdmann is a comedy; the people who made it don't think so, and yet, watching, you can't help but find yourself laughing. “OK, you laugh," Hüller acknowledges. "But it comes from despair, no?" Exactly.

Hair OLIVIER SCHAWALDER at ART + COMMERCE
Makeup KARIN WESTERLUND at STREETERS using VICTORIA BECKHAM BEAUTY
Set Design JEAN-HUGUES DE CHATILLON
Nails HANAE GOUMRI at WALTER SCHUPFER MANAGEMENT
Photography Assistants CLARA BELLEVILLE, MARINE GRANDPIERRE, and MATTIA MIRANDOLA
Digital Operator MATTEO MIANI
Styling Assistants ISABELLA DAMAZIO, SABINE GROZA, and HAYLEY CLUTTERBUCK
Tailor ROBBIE VAN MIERLO
Hair Assistant CLOÉ HOBI
Makeup Assistant MORGANE NICOL
Production CAROLINE DANIAUD and ARIANE COUDÉ DU FORESTO
Post Production CORENTIN BUREAU