It’s hard to imagine that anyone could have a better year than Sandra Höller did in 2023. The German actress starred in Justine Treat’s Palme d’Or-winning film Anatomy of a fall And Jonathan Glazer Area of interest – Two Oscar nominees for Best Picture would catapult her to international fame.
But Holler’s plan for 2026 may be a run for his money this year. In February, she won the Best Actress award at the Berlinale for her performance in the film rose. March brought a release Hail Mary projectopposite Ryan Gosling, which became one of the most critically and commercially acclaimed films of the year so far. She’s here in Cannes with Paweł Pawlikowski Homelandwhere she gave a stunning performance as Thomas Mann’s daughter, and in October she will share the screen with Tom Cruise in Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s film. digger.
In fact, Holler is reaping the rewards of 2023 — the year that caught her attention in Hollywood — and she dives into it all in an exclusive conversation Friday morning with Hollywood Reporter Executive Awards Editor Scott Feinberg for the award-winning podcast, Awards talksin the hall of the Palais Campari in Cannes. The scene is set with floor-to-ceiling Campari bottles and sparkling red mirrors.
The retrospective conversation began with Holler talking about growing up in Friedrichroda, a small town in eastern Germany. Here, as with other artists, she was inspired by a teacher who saw something special. “English and German teacher […] “If she’s listening now, I still love you,” Holler said, drawing chuckles from the audience. “I opened a drama club at school, and I wasn’t a kid who had many hobbies or anything like that. I mostly read and watched TV. It sounds sad, but I loved being in other worlds and imagining people and observing them, and she told me this could be a good place for me, and I’ve never stopped since then — to watch people, photograph people, meet humans. So I’m grateful.” “Her very.”
Höller graduated from the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin in 2003. Even after that experience, she never considered cinema as an option for her. “I consider myself a theater actress,” Levenberg said. “It’s just a coincidence that I got into cinema one way or another, and this is not the case [me] Courtesy catch! “I still don’t know the rules of filmmaking,” she admitted.[I’m] I’m always amazed at how everything goes, and I also look at my colleagues who are so professional with the camera angles and preparations and all that stuff, it’s a completely different kind of thing. [to the] The kind in which I learned.”
But three years after graduating from drama school, the actress found herself at the Hans Christian Schmid School massin which the 27-year-old played a woman who suffers violent epileptic seizures that lead her Catholic family to suspect that she is possessed by a demon. And now, 20 years later, she is rose The win in Berlin was a full circle moment: mass She also won the Best Actress award at the German Film Festival. “That was a good start,” she began. “They weren’t looking for perfection…the team was very nice and warm.”
Over the next few years, Höller worked in theater and increasingly in films, making a name for herself as one of Europe’s brightest talents thanks to her acting prowess. The American screenings had not yet flowed in, but then they came to Cannes with two generations: the Jonathan Glazer show Area of interest And Justin Treat Anatomy of a falltwo of the greatest films shown on the Croisette in recent years.
Feinberg and Holler started with Area of interest. It is known that the actress played the role of Hedwig Hoss, the wife of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of the German Auschwitz concentration camp. When Holler was asked about her personal connection to the story and the research into her family history, she replied, “You have to look at where you come from and what things resonate in your body without you knowing. I really wanted to know, so I asked all my grandparents about their connections to the Nazi regime, and I couldn’t find anything. Maybe they lied, I don’t know. I’ll find out when they’re gone,” sparking more laughter among listeners.
“That was one of the reasons it was possible for me, but it also had to do with the method [Glazer] I wanted to say that, and we talked a lot about the inside – the death of these people [doesn’t make the Nazis] Feel Anything… He really wanted to show people who have everything, but don’t have anything and don’t know how to be happy, and so I really liked that approach.
When it came to Triet’s film, in which her character plays a German writer living in France who is accused of murdering her French husband, Feinberg told Holler that Triet said she had no second choice for the role. “She sent me the script, and she pressed me and said, ‘I wrote it for you,'” the star recalls. “Then I read it, and it was quite clear, from the first pages, that this was very special, and I really wanted to be in it.”
Feinberg also asked her whether or not she believed she committed the act her character is accused of, and whether Tritt had revealed the answer. “At first, I thought I needed to know, and I was thinking of her as an innocent person,” Holler said. “I was very defensive of her in my ideas and in developing the whole work, and I think two days before we started shooting, I called Justine, and I thought, ‘What if she actually cheats on me in something?’ So I had a trust issue a couple of days before, and I asked her if she was really innocent or if she was just playing with me and in the end she turned everything around — which was going to end our friendship — and she said, ‘I can’t tell you, I don’t know, but I want you to play it like she’s innocent,’ and that made it worse for me. So, I had two days to decide. What I’m going to do, and I realized that it doesn’t really matter if she’s a murderer or not it’s really about what other people think about her.
Feinberg then asked her to reflect on that wild year. “To sum it up, she is the first person to receive two Best Actress nominations in the same year for a European Film Award, BAFTA nominations for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress in the same year, a Best Actress Oscar nomination, and the star of two best Oscar nominated films…” he said.
“It was all at once,” Holler replied. “I really have to thank the people who put the schedule together, my German press agency, because it was really difficult to balance the dates with the two films. So they did all that. I don’t know. You go through these things, it’s an experience, you try to adapt to everything, you try to see the beauty in everything, you meet people, you learn a lot about yourself in those environments – it’s a huge honor. It’s a lot of love coming through.” [my] road.”
And soon they came Hail Mary projectWhere Holler played the role of Eva Stratt, head of an international task force trying to save humanity from extinction. When asked about embracing commercial projects on a larger scale after years in the genre, she replied: “Well, there’s such a thing as scale, and then there’s something else.” [of] Quality on this scale. I didn’t necessarily want to do something really big, because it could be really bad. I’m not good at a lot of things, so I have to find something I can do without feeling bad all the time, so this was an opportunity, because I love Chris Miller and Phil Lord movies, and of course I adore Ryan Gosling. What can you say? “I just had to do it.”
She continued: “When you play with someone like Ryan Gosling, you’re not trying to compete. I could never be as fast and innovative as him. I can just be there and try to find an ending to the scene, and then it will all happen on its own, probably.”
Holler said she doesn’t like to prepare too much in advance for a role. “No matter what anyone says, being away from the set, being away from people, being away from my partner, coming in there and realizing my own vision… I think that’s not what makes the work fulfilling. I like to collaborate, so I don’t do a lot of preparation.”
It was Gosling who suggested the adorable karaoke scene — it wasn’t in the initial script — and Holler’s instinct was to… He rejected it. She quickly came around. Seeing the audience’s reaction also helped. “Honestly, it was a lot of fun singing it,” she said. “It’s kind of twisted if people like it for that reason, because of course I was hoping they would absolutely love it [before]. But I’m glad this scene came out.
THRThen came the awards editor Homelandwhich premiered last night to rapturous applause here in Cannes, and “I think I learned the most,” Holler said [on this film] Than any other film.” When I asked Feinberg about her character’s repression and, at times, explosive nature — Erika slapped her ex-husband, the Nazi-aligned actor Gustav Gründgens — “I’m aware of that…there are always limitations. We go through the world and there are rules and personal choices we make that then sometimes force us to put up with things until we can put up with them anymore. Personally, I like to walk away if I can’t handle something.
Finally, Feinberg teases out what we can expect from the highly anticipated film digger With Tom Cruise: “I’m about to explode wanting to talk about this movie,” she said. “I can’t. Legally I can’t. I can say I saw a copy.” [of it] This is probably not the final version, and it impresses me more than anything I’ve ever seen. That’s all I can say. “I think it will be a great movie.”
