We met the writer in Turin, at the Salone del Libro. It turned into a long conversation in which he spoke about his morning walks, his past in radio, the Meridiani series, and the editor he has worked with for forty years.
Sandra Hüller could set an unthinkable record: four Oscar nominations, for four different films, in a single year.
The actress could receive a nomination for every film she appears in in 2026: Fatherland, Rose, Project Hail Mary e Digger.
We all know an Oscar clip when we see one. It is that meticulously engineered sequence, placed about two-thirds into a film, designed to showcase the emotional range of a performer, almost always through a tearful monologue or a nervous breakdown.
In Fatherland, the black-and-white historical drama by Paweł Pawlikowski just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Sandra Hüller delivers one with surgical precision, playing Erika Mann, the daughter of Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, on a journey through a newly born, divided Germany.
The strange thing is that, over the coming months, we may be seeing three more Oscar clips starring Hüller.
The German actress, 48, with an extraordinary career we only properly clocked too late thanks to Anatomy of a Fall (2023), is currently living through an unprecedented cinematic year.
Thanks in part to the Academy’s recent rule change, which now allows performers to receive multiple nominations in the same category for different films, Hüller is, in theory, in a position to land four nominations at once: two for Best Actress, two for Best Supporting Actress.
On one side are the products of austere European festival cinema couture, such as Pawlikowski’s aforementioned film and Rose, the Austrian historical drama applauded in Berlin, in which she plays a woman who disguises herself as a man in the 17th century.
On the other, Hüller is currently dominating the global box office with Project Hail Mary, a breakout hit in which she plays Eva Stratt, the mission coordinator who, alongside Ryan Gosling, delivers a surreal and tragic karaoke scene set to Harry Styles.
Then, in October, she will co-star opposite Tom Cruise in Digger, the black comedy directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, already considered by many a frontrunner for the next awards season.
Sandra Hüller’s rise reflects a radically transformed Academy, more international, finally fluent in non-English acting codes, and willing to embrace the full complexity of performance.