Oscar-tipped Project Hail Mary star reveals process of bringing new acclaimed true story drama film to life

There are very few actors who have had a busier – or more successful – 2026 than Sandra Hüller.

Not only has the German star had key parts in two of the most talked-about studio films of the year – the acclaimed Project Hail Mary and the rather more divisive Digger – she's also had starring roles in two very well-received black-and-white German language films.

Those two films are Markus Schleinzer's Rose and Paweł Pawlikowski's Fatherland, with Hüller's performances in both marking her out as an Oscar's contender as she looks to follow up the nomination she received for Anatomy of a Fall back in 2024.

Rose won't be released in UK cinemas until next February, but Fatherland arrives this weekend – five months after it received rave reviews at its Cannes Film Festival premiere.

The film is centred on the revered, Nobel prize-winning German writer Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) as he returns to his homeland in 1949, years after he had fled on the eve of World War II.

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Hüller plays his daughter Erika, who travels with him across the newly split country as he controversially makes plans to attend celebrations in both Frankfurt in West Germany and Weimar in the East.

And speaking to Radio Times about playing the role, she revealed that he felt a "certain responsibility" in playing a real world figure such as Erika Mann, even though the narrative featured in the film is fictionalised.
"You want to do them justice in a way," she said. "But at the same time, we know the limitations of the possibilities to do so, because we are only showing five days in their lives. That they haven't actually spent together.

"We are very aware of the fact that it's a fiction that we are dealing with that gives us a lot of freedom," she added. "But I think the base of their relationship was important to us.

"And to find out about it... the letters they were writing to each other were very helpful in that. I can only describe it as one of the biggest pleasures of my life to explore that."

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Meanwhile, her co-star Zischler explained that he thought the film was dealing with "ghosts" as opposed to the real people it was depicting, given that "we only have a vague idea what they really were like".

He explained: "We have photos, we have documents, whatever. But this is not the personal life.

"Interesting enough is that these two persons are daring something which is really very very strange," he added. 'Re-entering a country they were despised, knowing that their mission cannot be completed or not really be accomplished.

"But they have to do it because they are in some way urged to... and this is something very strange. Thomas is driven by the mission. They are aware that this might be a failure, but it's worth doing it. That's the Thomas and Erika Mann thing to do."

The film forms a loose thematic trilogy with Pawlikowski's previous two works – Ida and Cold War – both of which were also period films set in the middle of the twentieth century.

The auteur has gone on record to say that he prefers to make projects set in the past since it is easier to get a handle on than the present. But can such films also teach us something about the world we live in now?

"Since we live in the present, the films we make are informed by that, so you cannot really separate these two," Hüller explained.

"But for me it's impossible to give an answer to the question of how our time is connected to the time that we are portraying in this film. I think it would be too simple!"

"Think of TS Eliot, Four Quartets," added Zischler, referring to the 1936 poem Burnt Norton. "Time present is contained in time past. And that means we always think of containment, of thinking we have a certain time past that we know better than the present.

"At least we have an idea how the past might have looked like," he continued. "So we say, well, this could have been a certain image of the past, and we try to make it visible once more again through cinema. And this is the magic of cinema!"

Fatherland is released in UK cinemas on Friday 23 October.

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