She can juggle high-profile parts in Hollywood comedies with serious roles in critically acclaimed dramas, but Anne Hathaway is quickly learning that juggling her life under the glare of the media spotlight is the toughest part of all, writes MICHAEL DWYER.
OUR INTERVIEW GETS off to a very promising start. "I was so excited when I heard you were from The Irish Times," declares Anne Hathaway. "I'm a big fan of the paper." She is familiar with this newspaper from her two three-month stints working on the Irish-based productions, Ella Enchanted in 2004 when she was still an ingénue, and Becoming Jane (2007), the speculative romantic drama in which she portrayed the young Jane Austen.
"I had such a good time making those two movies, too much of a good time on Ella Enchanted," she says. "I had never encountered a place that was so much fun as Dublin and with such permissive social habits. By the time Becoming Janecame around, I was much more in control."
Then, before we settle down to talking pictures, the subject turns to shoes. “Do you mind if I take these off?” she asks. “I’ve been wearing them all day.” Far be it from me to object, and she removes her tartan-patterned stilettos before relaxing on a chaise longue in her suite at the Soho Hotel in London.
The heels look perilously steep, I observe, adding that my knowledge of wearing women’s footwear is limited to what Cillian Murphy told me about his preparations for playing a transvestite in Breakfast on Pluto and how his wife coached him in the delicate balance required for wearing stilettos. “Oh, that’s such a sweet story,” Hathaway smiles. “I love it.”
She's pretty sweet, too, unlike her character in Jonathan Demme's bittersweet serious comedy, Rachel Getting Married. Rosemarie DeWitt is radiant as the bride-to-be whose precision-planned wedding at the family home in Connecticut is threatened with disarray when her volatile sister Kym (played by Hathaway) returns from rehab for the event.
Still riddled with guilt over a fatal accident when she was 16 and stoned at the wheel of a car, Kym seems permanently on edge, even though she's "nine months clean", and she puts everyone else on edge as the wedding day looms. Nominated for a Golden Globe award last weekend, Hathaway's revelatory performance seems assured of securing her an Oscar nomination when the contenders are announced next Thursday. And she almost certainly will be in competition with Meryl Streep, her co-star in The Devil Wears Prada.
“Hell will freeze over the year I am nominated with Meryl Streep,” Hathaway protests, not entirely convincingly. “It would be so thrilling to get a nomination, but who’s going to beat Meryl in Doubt? Come to think of it, it would be fun to be nominated alongside her because there would be no pressure.”
In The Devil Wears Prada, Hathaway played the naive new assistant hired by a ruthless, domineering magazine editor based on Vogue editor Anna Wintour and played with unnerving hauteur by Streep.
“It was hard to forget that I was acting opposite Meryl Streep,” says Hathaway, “but it was such a trip. She is so down to earth. The thing about Meryl is that she will do anything she can to quell the perception of her as a diva. But on that film she let the diva into the room – not as Meryl, but as her character, Miranda. I felt intimidated, just like my character was, and that was so useful for me in playing that role. She is so generous, though, and she was so maternal and protective towards me. If I was struggling with anything, she always raised her game to another level so that I would raise mine.”
Hathaway herself is centre screen throughout Rachel Getting Married, subtly balancing all the complexities of her character.
“She’s defined by the past,” Hathaway says. “I would say that she’s the kind of girl who’s trying to stay on top of her past, and she’s not doing it with any hope for the future. Hope for Kym is a luxury. She leaves an institution for two communities. One community is non-judgmental and accepting and listens to her, and that’s a community of strangers – other people who are in recovery. The people who do judge her, who push her buttons and don’t accept her, are her family. I liked exploring those ideas. There are a lot of unresolved issues and tensions that people aren’t really talking about. And I went to some rehab meetings and talked to people in recovery and to members of their families. I do a lot of research.”
Did she like Kym when she first read the script? “I did. She’s a pain in the ass, but she’s got a great sense of humour and a really biting take on things. She’s witty. She’s ferociously intelligent. She’s got a heart as deep as the ocean. She would rather die than hurt anyone intentionally, but she doesn’t quite realise that she does hurt people a lot of the time.”
Gradually and rather unexpectedly, as we get to know Kym, we get to like her. “She doesn’t see life in terms of people liking her or not,” says Hathaway. “She’s trying her hardest to survive and not to use again. She’s not someone people feel comfortable around. She’s a divisive, volatile person. It didn’t occur to me to try and make her likeable because that wouldn’t have occurred to Kym. I just wanted her to be understood.”
Letting go of Kym after the end of the shoot was more difficult than Hathaway imagined, she says. “There was no going back to the way I was before. I was changed by her. She became a friend. I liked her so much by then that it took me a couple of weeks to adjust to not being her anymore. That level of freedom I felt as Kym was something I needed to find for myself. It was only then that I could let her go, but I do miss her.”
To establish and sustain the edgy relationship between Kym and her sister Rachel, Hathaway and Rosemarie DeWitt kept at arm’s length off the set. “Rosemarie is lovely and we got on well,” she says, “but we weren’t close during the shooting of the film. We wanted to go out together at night, but we both felt it would be better if we didn’t get to know each other too well. I never felt distant from her. It was as if we just turned the sound down on the conversation.”
The mother of Kym and Rachel is played in an affecting comeback performance by Debra Winger in her first significant screen role for more than a decade. “As great as that part was on the page, the way it translates on to the screen is so powerful,” says Hathaway. “Debra is brilliant. I cannot imagine the responsibility of having her mind. I don’t think she disappeared from movies as such. She just stepped back. Debra is a total individual. She will only do whatever she wants to do.”
The dramatic tension and uneasy atmosphere of the movie is heightened in Irish-American cinematographer Declan Quinn’s prowling hand-held camerawork. “It was strange at first,” says Hathaway, “because we, as actors, never knew where the camera was going to be. Declan told us just to do what we had to do and he would get it. That way it was like doing theatre every day, and more about playing a scene as honestly as you possibly could and knowing that somehow a movie was being made. It was like being in a play that somebody was making a documentary about.”
The movie marks a turning point for Hathaway's career, just as her roles in Brokeback Mountainand The Devil Wears Pradawere in recent years.
“I hope so,” she says. “It’s nice to feel you’re worth discovering again. I guess I’ve moved on to playing women over 25 and that’s good. I can never be written off as just young anymore. If I say something stupid, I’ve said something stupid.”
I quote a remark she made to a US magazine last year, that she felt uncomfortable with attention and that she is a wallflower by nature. Isn’t that unusual given the profession she has chosen?
“I know,” she says, “but I swear to God that I didn’t know all it involved. When I dreamed of being an actor, it never occurred to me to care about the lives of actors, or their secret lives. I don’t know if it would have deterred me, but it might have given me pause. I never even thought I would make it into movies. I just thought I would do theatre for the rest of my life. I really thought I was going to lead an anonymous, artistic fulfilling life. My life is as anonymous as it possibly could be, and it’s certainly artistically fulfilling, but people are watching.”
People have been watching and whatever anonymity she enjoyed was eroded when her relationship with Italian real-estate operator Raffaello Follieri ended last year. She broke up with him after nearly four years together, before he was charged with defrauding investors while posing as an agent of the Vatican. Follieri pleaded guilty to 14 charges of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy, and was sentenced to four a half years in prison. It’s one of those stranger-than-fiction scenarios that someday could become the basis of a movie, but it’s not one that she’s keen to discuss.
Now 26, Hathaway was drawn to acting in her teens in her native New Jersey and studied at the prestigious Barrow Group Theatre in New York. She secured her first starring role in 1999 on the short-lived TV series, Get Real. Within two years she was playing the leading role in The Princess Diaries. "It's hard to believe that it's coming up on a decade since I started," she says. "It will be a decade in March." What would she wish for the next 10 years? "Employment," she says after a pause. "Truth. Satisfaction."
In between her meaty roles in The Devil Wears Pradaand Rachel Getting Married, Hathaway starred in two slight comedies that made few demands on her. She played Agent 99 opposite Steve Carell in Get Smart. "The interesting thing about working with Steve was to find that he's so sweet. Somebody once described Patrick Wilson as being so normal that he's exotic, but it applies to Steve as well."
And by coincidence, Hathaway features in another wedding movie, the recently released Bride Wars, co-starring with Kate Hudson as best friends who fall out when their nuptials clash.
"That's a big fat commercial romp," she says. "It couldn't be more different from Rachel Getting Married. It's an easy, breezy comedy, and not taxing in the slightest. It's just a good time."
Hathaway is a soprano and has sung on stage, and she was offered one of the leading roles in the screen musical, The Phantom of the Opera.
"I couldn't do it because Disney wouldn't let me out of my contract for The Princess Diaries 2. I was hugely disappointed. Singing is something I like to do, but when it comes to art and pursuing it as a career, it needs to be something that's as important as breath. For me, acting is that and singing just isn't. But if the opportunity arose where I could sing in a movie, I would jump at it."
Next up for her is Tim Burton's new treatment of Alice in Wonderland, which promises to be as strange and surreal as we have come to expect from Burton.
“I don’t want to give too much away about it,” she says, “but it’s fun to be in Tim Burton’s sandbox and to get to be one of the mad peripheral people. So, yes, it’s back to the kids’ fantasy genre again, but now I’m not the girl anymore. I’m playing the White Queen.”
- Rachel Getting Marriedopens next Friday. Bride Warsis now on general release.