Anne Hathaway Knows Exactly Who She Is Now
After weathering the storms of Hollywood, the wildly busy star is collecting her flowers.
On enjoying this point in her life with her career and family: Her sons, ages 6 and 10, are “in this really fun zone where we all love hanging out together, which I understand may change,” she says. “Well, we will always love hanging out with them, but their feelings about us might change,” she clarifies, laughing. “So for the moment, we’re all just in it. Adam and I are soaking it up. I’m having the most wonderful time with my family, living in the city of my dreams, and work seems to be going really, really well,” she continues. “So rather obnoxiously, I’m having a great time as everything else burns.”
We bond over the need for joyful distractions amid the general state of the world. “There’s that famous phrase: ‘We need our bread, but we need our roses, too.’ And I would be so sad without them,” Hathaway says. “Life asks so much of everyone to just stay in it. Why would we work so hard if not to experience joy, if not to contribute to beauty or experience beauty? I think you have to learn how to hold all these things simultaneously.”
On maintaining a sense of wonder after decades in the industry by refusing to take her career for granted: “For example, like working with Chris [Nolan] for the third time, it doesn’t get old,” she says of The Odyssey director, who previously cast her in The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar. “You become even more awed by it, by how rare it is. To get that experience once is so rare. Twice—what a gift. Three times—I don’t even have words for it. And so I’m very aware of how determined I am to be harmonious with it all, because look at this,” she says, gesturing to the room full of fancy clothes. “If I’m not enjoying it, then really, really what’s wrong with me? If I can’t have a positive outlook on it when I’m having such a fortunate ride, then it would be wasted on me.”
On how The Odyssey was a homecoming of sorts: “I hadn’t been on a set with Chris in 12 years,” she says. “And because I’ve worked so hard in the last dozen years, both as a person and as an actor, I was excited to show him what I’ve been up to.”
Nolan tells me he noticed. “There’s a maturity to her performances now,” he says. “It’s not that something was missing before, it’s just it’s developed, as moving through life develops us all. Her work has a sense of quiet calm to it that’s really remarkable.” And despite her veteran status, he says, Hathaway is always looking to challenge herself. “She’s never satisfied with what she’s done in the past, or what she’s doing in the moment. She’s always striving for something just beyond her grasp.”
On how she and Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, spent a lot of time talking about the bond between their characters: “In a time when so many marriages were made for political convenience, the two of them chose each other, and they understood what they had and that not everybody gets that,” Hathaway says. It helps that she finds herself in such a partnership offscreen. “My whole thing about marriage is…it’s such a big deal to share your life with someone. You know? Because it’s yours. It’s fully yours to do anything you want with,” she says. “And so to find someone who inspires you to say, ‘As great as this is on my own, sharing it with you feels like it could lead to somewhere even better.’ I imagine that actually is rare, and I do feel like I found that and I don’t take it for granted.”
On if posting the video of the trick her hairstylist uses to give her face a little extra lift was a pointed denial of rumors she’s had a facelift: “I wouldn’t say pointed. But we’re at a time when people feel very confident in assuming what they think is fact, and sometimes what they think is accurate and sometimes it’s not,” she says diplomatically. “My preference would be to never comment on anything and to just live in the mystery and not draw attention to myself, but the speculation has gotten so loud that you do feel the need to just get your truth out there. And I’ll probably always wonder, ‘Should I have posted that or not? Should I have just kept going and done the thing that makes me happy and makes me feel more confident on the red carpet?’ But I felt like the conversation was becoming distracting.”
“Also, by the way, these are huge medical decisions that people are presuming,” she adds. “I wanted to show that like, no, I didn’t make a huge medical decision. It’s just two braids.” She takes me over to the mirror to demonstrate the trick on my hair—and I have to say, my eyes instantly looked a little less tired. “And by the way, the other thing about all this is, I might still get a facelift someday,” she notes.
On how filming The Devil Wears Prada 2 gave Hathaway a do-over: “You know how you’ll have certain memories or times in your life that you wish you could revisit because you’re like, ‘God, I wish I could go back there and be the person that I am now and know what I know now.’ That’s what it was like,” she says. “I’ve always felt this enormous debt of gratitude to the movie and how I was protected, especially by [director] David Frankel. So it was exciting to get to go back and say thank you, and show all the work that I’ve done on myself and just aim to be an absolute delight every day.”
“To have worked so hard in my life to have…sorry, I do get emotional thinking about it,” she says, her eyes welling with tears, “to have become a more positive person, to have become a healthier person, to have become a safer person, I was really happy that I could share that with people who were so formative and responsible for so many of the beautiful things that I have in my life.”
Photographer: Norman Jean Roy
Stylist: Law Roach
Writer: Kayla Webley Adler
Hair: Orlando Pita
Makeup: Fulvia Farolfi
Manicure: Deborah Lippmann
[Photo Credit: Norman Jean Roy for ELLE Magazine]
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