The lauded German comedy Toni Erdmann features Sandra Hüller singing what has to be the most triumphantly awkward performance of “Greatest Love of All” in cinematic history. Hüller’s Ines, a closed-off corporate consultant living in Bucharest, spends nearly three hours onscreen enduring the outrageous pranks of her estranged father as he reenters her life to lighten her up and strengthen their bond. His climactic stunt—fooling Ines into taking on an American classic at a Romanian stranger’s Easter party—risks her total humiliation. Stiff in a white button-down and black blazer, trying to bury her thick German accent, she stumbles into the song while her father, donning a ridiculous wig and false teeth, plays piano beside her. A few minutes in, she’s all but screaming the lyrics. This emotional crescendo, so fully earned in Hüller’s bracing turn, marks the moment that a generational talent revealed herself.

Hüller was in her late 30s then, with more than a decade of film credits behind her. Still, Toni Erdmann brought her to the US for the first time ever, thanks to a successful push for a best international film Oscar nomination. Fans here had no idea who she was and treated her like a discovery. It all seemed to promise a bright, glitzy future as a movie star. “But nothing happened after,” Hüller says now from her home in Germany, not a shred of disappointment in her voice. “It can just be over in a minute, and that’s okay.”

Hüller does not carry herself like a campaigner, even though the noise around her has been about 10 times what it was seven years ago. She has not one but two movies with critical love and Oscar buzz in Justine Triet’s moral thriller Anatomy of a Fall and Jonathan Glazer’s Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest. Initially, Hüller acts as if not much is going on at all, which seems hard to believe. She remains grounded in conversation, committed to the idea that the excitement will fade, she won’t get sucked into the system, her actual life has nothing to do with this. She does not see stardom as her calling—but the spotlight has fallen on her all the same. Since both films are international productions not covered by SAG-AFTRA, which stayed on strike through all of the fall’s major festivals, she was one of few contenders who could publicly present her work to some of the industry’s most powerful tastemakers. She worries the many plaudits coming her way now have a bit to do with such an advantage: “I’m not sure if I would’ve had that attention, if everybody would’ve been able to come.”

Either way, she deserved the acclaim. Both Anatomy and Zone debuted in Cannes in May, taking home the festival’s Palme d’Or (first place) and Grand Prix (second place), respectively. Between the two movies, Hüller showcases an astounding range. She acts extensively and seamlessly in three languages, veers between defiantly human and mundanely evil, holds tight close-ups and long tracking shots, and meets the complex demands of two characters unlike any she’s ever taken on. She could conceivably receive Oscar nominations for both titles—running in lead for Anatomy and supporting for Zone—which, Hüller knows, requires a bit of extra legwork on the awards trail. “I don’t feel adjusted to it at all,” she says.

Our last and longest Zoom chat takes place two weeks after she’s returned from a short trip to Telluride, where both of her movies again screened to great fanfare. She’s now back home in Germany, where she lives with her 12-year-old daughter, regularly taking five-hour train rides to play Hamlet onstage in Bochum while also starring in a stage adaptation of the 1962 film The Exterminating Angel. Is it overwhelming, balancing all the commitments? “We manage,” she says. Does the amount of work that goes into a major Oscar push start to feel like too much? Not really: “I only go to events when I really have to. When I’m there, I enjoy it, and then I’m out of the attention zone.”

To get to know Hüller as a person is not unlike getting to know her onscreen—not unlike watching her belt out some Whitney Houston after barely raising her voice for the preceding two hours. She doesn’t rush in the expression of big feelings, of what’s going on inside. But when she gets there, she doesn’t hold back.

Nobody seems to know this better than Justine Triet, whose superb Anatomy of a Fall offers Hüller the role of a lifetime. Triet conceived the tricky character study with Hüller in mind, naming the film’s lead character Sandra about a year before even sending the actor the script. They’d met on Triet’s previous movie, 2019’s Sybil, in which Hüller portrayed a caustic, unraveling filmmaker. Triet understands what has been apparent about Hüller’s screen presence since her breakout role in 2006’s Requiem: She takes her time. “She’s always playing a character, but her way of conjuring that character always seems like she’s bringing it very, very close to herself,” Triet says. “There’s something that transcends the script.”

In Anatomy of a Fall, Hüller plays a German writer living in France whose husband has fallen from their home’s upper-story window to his death. Sandra becomes a suspect and stands trial, the dizzyingly twisty inquiry sweeping up her protective young son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), and her suave attorney, Vincent (Swann Arlaud). Triet’s script never asserts guilt or innocence but uses the framework of a legal drama to examine the brutal interrogation of one’s identity, down to the language she speaks. (Hüller spoke French in the courtroom scenes despite not being fluent, just as Sandra does; like Sandra, Hüller is also comparatively fluent in English.) “It’s very much a film about the audience and what their perspective is on a successful woman, on a bisexual woman, on all these things,” Hüller says, “and how the thoughts on her change with every information they get.” The actor herself felt that push and pull, asking Triet early on whether Sandra was guilty. Triet had no answer but asked that Hüller play her as innocent.

Hüller reveals everything and nothing about Sandra at the same time. Anguish and pride and grief and dashes of wicked humor infuse her portrayal, but she holds back—even as Sandra argues she has nothing to hide. You sense she doesn’t want to be figured out, that she doesn’t owe the world her deepest self. “Actors like to do really big things sometimes, and they love emotions, and they want to show it—but in my experience, and maybe I’m the only one, normally people try to avoid that in their lives because it’s really painful,” Hüller says. “It takes a long time until somebody says, ‘Okay, this is enough, and now I’m going to scream at you.’” Once she gets to that big moment in Anatomy of a Fall, when the film flashes back to a fight between Sandra and her husband, it’s explosive—if also somehow inevitable, as if Hüller had lit a fuse and meticulously played every beat toward detonation.

Hüller’s characters can have messy and confusing inner lives; they are, to some extent, blocked off. She plays that torment so brilliantly partly because it’s what brought her to acting in the first place. Hüller grew up in the small German town of Friedrichroda. “There was always a lot going on inside, and I didn’t really have a place to put it,” she says. It wasn’t just the ability to step into different roles, when she joined a drama club as a teenager, that felt so freeing. “I loved the way that we were talking to each other, the awareness that everybody had for each other, the kindness—the discussions we had about certain topics that I didn’t find anywhere else in my surroundings,” she says. “It wasn’t common in my small town to speak about the things that were important to me, let’s put it that way.”

Acting has become a refuge for Hüller, a way of understanding how to see and move through the world. She’s less fond of pushing herself to do roles that feel alien to her. “These are words that I really don’t have in my purse—I don’t use ambition, and I don’t use push—because they are really unfamiliar to me,” she says. “I have colleagues that say that’s a lie: ‘You’re just lying. Everybody has it.’” Certainly, most of her roles demand serious emotional and physical investment. But there is a fear of failure she can’t seem to outrun, that often makes her wonder if it’s time to quit acting altogether. “From the moment I wake up in the morning, every second I know that everything can go wrong—I can just fail, and I have to live with it,” Hüller says. “With every movie, there’s this certain part where I think, Okay, this is the time I’ll mess up. I don’t know how to do it anymore.”

This seems like the appropriate time to ask about The Zone of Interest, a fraught project that unnerved Hüller throughout filming. Now one of Germany’s foremost actors, Hüller tends to view Holocaust films with caution and declined to star in them all her life until Zone. “I see colleagues on social media who take pictures in SS uniforms when they are on a shoot, and I absolutely cannot understand how a thing like that can happen,” she says. “They’re posing, they’re making publicity—it’s such a wrong thing to be proud of portraying such a character, or be at ease with it.”

Glazer’s haunting drama, loosely adapted from Martin Amis’s novel of the same name, contains no such ease. Zone observes the daily routine of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife, Hedwig (Hüller), as they lead lavish lives next door to the concentration camp. When Hüller realized what she was being offered, she initially declined. “I had a really physical reaction—I felt sick, like I had to throw up because I was so scared about this topic,” she says. “I had been avoiding it for such a long time.” The film plays like a horror movie in its utter ordinariness, the petty concerns of marital spats and job transfers taking place against Glazer’s searing soundscape, signaling the torture and murder happening just over the Höss garden wall. The family can hear it, but they don’t care. “[Glazer] wanted to find out how this kind of life is possible—he wanted to make the connection between us and them,” Hüller says.

That conceit convinced her to take on the role, but she needed to change her approach. “I consider it very dangerous to do a thing like this psychologically, because normally as an actor I try to connect with the character that I play—I develop empathy for them, I try to figure out why they are the way they are,” Hüller says. “I couldn’t use my technique anymore, because I didn’t want that woman to have any of my capacity to connect or love. I didn’t want to give her any of that.”

There’s a vacuousness to Hedwig that, in Hüller’s iciness, comes across as deeply disturbing. “Sandra’s struggle is in her performance,” Glazer says. “It’s a portrait of someone nonthinking. [Hedwig] never stops to think. She’s always doing. Always moving. There’s no self-reflection.” Hüller’s commitment in that regard is remarkable, since the very act of making the movie unsettled her. Her costar Friedel tells me that they expressed nervousness to each other throughout the shoot, though they both felt deeply proud of the final product: “We had phone calls: ‘What are we doing here? Is this right?’”

Hüller is always questioning—herself, her material, her character. There seems to be a kind of clinical severity to the way she assesses situations, and she does not shy away from the gravity of a given moment. Yet in making The Zone of Interest, she made room for a familiar taste of home. Her dog, accompanying Hüller on set, wound up in the movie, running around and creating dysfunction amid Glazer’s controlled portrait of evil. (Hüller guards her privacy to the extent that she won’t publicly reveal her pet’s name.) So what was it like, allowing the warmly personal into such a severely professional environment? “Well, she’s her own dog personality. She’s not a part of me,” Hüller replies—with a laugh! A new layer unpeeled. She’s smiling now, alive at the very mention of her pup.

Glazer, the British director, was apparently grateful that Hüller’s dog was untrained, providing the movie with a fresh dose of chaos. At this, I mention that my own undisciplined dog would probably not fare so well on a film set. “Where is your dog?” Hüller asks immediately. “Oh, please, please. I want to see him.” I look around but he is, alas, out for his morning walk. Then we share, against all odds, personal stories about the lives we lead with our pets. We somehow apologize to each other for getting too private.

Eventually, I lead us back toward the subject of work, and Hüller answers my initial question rather dutifully: “To be loved by a creature, while playing this character, was really soothing and important for me.” I can tell she’d rather go back to the dog stories.

Hüller is a true international star, making movies across Europe—she performs regularly in English, German, and French and is currently improving her Spanish. But in Germany, a sticky tradition continues to drive her up the wall. Theatrically exhibited films in the country are often dubbed, so the characters all speak German—even if, in the original cut, they definitely do not. Hüller tends to dub her non-German-language movies herself. She recalls the “cruel” dubbing experience for Anatomy of a Fall, which she agreed to at the request of its German distributor. She’s visibly upset by the memory of being in that recording booth. “It makes me so mad, I can’t even tell you,” she says.

The movie’s communication barrier—Sandra takes the stand not well-versed in French yet is required to speak it—is crucial to the narrative. But the dubbed German cut has each character speaking the same language anyway, so that plot point—that key aspect of Hüller’s exacting characterization—simply evaporates. “When I’m acting, voice is such an important part of it: It says so much about where I am or how I really feel, if I am tense, if I’m at ease,” she says. “It’s a long topic, and I’m still not over the fact that I really did it.” She says she may never dub again: “It’s awful. It’s really—I find it humiliating and sort of damaging to myself.”

It may sound like a small thing, but Hüller’s at her most vulnerable telling me this. In conversation, as in her movies, she builds slowly toward candor. She doesn’t make it easy. The real gift comes when she lets you in.

HAIR, DANILO; MAKEUP, KATE LEE; MANICURE, MARISA CARMICHAEL; TAILOR, MARKO GUILLÉN; SET DESIGN, ROBERT DORAN. PRODUCED ON LOCATION BY VIEWFINDERS. FOR DETAILS, GO TO VF.COM/CREDITS.