The Zurich Film Festival (ZFF) will honor two-time Oscar nominee Naomi Watts this year with a Golden Eye Award for her performance in Ben Shirinian’s The Housewife.
In the ’60s-set drama, based on a true-story, a young New York Times journalist, played by Tye Sheridan, tracks down a man he suspects of being a Nazi officer living secretly in Queens (Luke Evans). But when the reporter befriends the suspect’s elegant and enigmatic wife (Watts), the implications of his investigation become much more unsettling.
The Housewife will have its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival before heading to Zurich. Watts will accept her Golden Eye honor in person in Zurich on Sept. 26 and take part in a ZFF masterclass.
“Since her breakthrough in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, Naomi Watts has been one of the most fascinating actresses of our time,” said Zurich Festival CEO Christian Jungen, announcing the honor on Thursday. “Her greatest performances thrive on the tension between glamour and darkness, between what a character reveals and what she conceals — making her the kind of character actress Hitchcock would have loved.”
In The Housewife, said Jungen, Watts “masters this ambiguity as an elegant and mysterious woman [and] delivers one of the most compelling performances of her career.”
Watts is a two-time Academy Award nominee, nominated for best actress in 2004 for her turn as a grieving mother in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams; and in 2013 for her role as a survivor of the 2004 tsunami in J.A. Bayona’s The Impossible. On the small screen, her performance as Baby Paley in the second season of Ryan Murphy’s Feud earned her an Emmy nomination for best actress in a limited/anthology series or TV movie.
Previous winners of Zurich’s Golden Eye Award include Kristen Stewart, Jude Law, Benedict Cumberbatch and Dakota Johnson. The 2026 Zurich Film Festival runs Sept. 24 – Oct. 4.
