Anne Hathaway is screaming. Eyes wild, skin aflame. Cresting, her voice vaults to a frequency you figure could shatter glass. “How was that?” she asks Jack Antonoff, lowering her headphones. “Try another one?”
“Sure, let’s go again,” Antonoff replies, fiddling with various buttons and levers on his monumental recording console. “One more like that. Keep it frightening.”
“Got it: hounds of hell,” says Hathaway, nodding. Ever the diligent student. Then she turns to me, mischievous. “I have no idea where all this anger is coming from….”
Hathaway and Antonoff are spending this first balmy spring Saturday tucked away at a Manhattan studio because they are in the final stages of transforming famously plucky Anne Hathaway, movie star with a megawatt smile, into a moody pop diva. She’s dropped her two sons off at Little League and come here in low-glam mode (Knicks jersey, jeans) to record songs for David Lowery’s upcoming film Mother Mary, in which Hathaway plays the title character—a sort of Gaga–Taylor Swift hybrid who is, uh, having a moment. And not “having a moment” in the sense of basking in the glow of public adoration, but something more like its opposite. Searching for her own center and finding only darkness, she has fled her tour and sought out the old friend (played by Michaela Coel) who helped craft her all-consuming public persona in the first place. It’s a strange, indelible film—which won’t surprise anyone familiar with Lowery’s previous work (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story). Hathaway coveted the part, she says, and it wound up challenging her more than any previous role.
“What struck me right away, reading the script, is that you can’t ‘perform’ Mother Mary,” says Hathaway. “If I got the part, I would have to become material David could craft with.” In essence, she had to make herself into a credible global pop star, one capable of executing complex choreography in a headdress and high heels and channeling the songs that Antonoff and Charli XCX were writing on her behalf. But preparing for all of this wasn’t simply a matter of dance practice or learning to sing by seething and sneering and, yes, sometimes screaming. “I had to submit to being a beginner,” she explains. “The humility of that—showing up every day knowing you’re going to suck. And it has to be okay. You’re not ‘bad.’ You’re just a beginner. Getting to that mindset—I had to shed some things that were hard to shed. It was welcome. But it was hard, the way transformational experiences can be hard.”
Hathaway radiates enthusiasm. It seems to be her default setting. She’s aglow as she talks about struggling through nearly two years of daily dance training, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. to start, plus singing lessons that instigated a minor identity crisis—not to mention navigating a long shoot in and around Cologne, Germany, that every participant I spoke to for this story agrees was intense. The point is, she came out the other side remade.
“I’d say, You have to show me how you’re feeling with your body,” recalls choreographer Dani Vitale. “You can’t tell me you’re angry; show me. Proprioception. That was the training, getting Annie out of her head.” And giving Hathaway permission to be messy, vulgar, temperamental, and—above all—imperfect. “I remember that first day, being like, Oh no. Because she’s like a doll, you know? So pretty, so graceful. I thought, Oh God, I have to break this person.”
“I finally learned how to breathe,” says Hathaway of her sessions—ongoing—with Vitale. “My body was so locked up—I literally couldn’t take a deep breath. I’d been trying to open that space for years and I thought it was physically impossible. All my breath, it was stuck….” She makes a strangling gesture. A bit later, recalling her frustrations with her vocal coach, she stops mid-anecdote to strike a low note on the keyboard beside her. Idly, I assume. Then she explains that, just as she was reaching her breaking point, she was instructed to lie on the floor “and make sounds until something felt true.”
“My whole life, I’ve been up here,” Hathaway continues, tapping a high note on the keyboard. “Soprano. My mom’s a soprano—a beautiful singer. And I can touch those notes, but….” Hathaway plays the low note again, letting it sustain. “It turns out, I’m down here. That’s where I like to live.”
Here’s the thing about Anne Hathaway: She is incredibly nice. That sounds like faint praise, but spending time with her made me question whether I’d ever met a truly nice person. I know many kind people—but you can be kind and also sometimes snarky, impatient, aggrieved, aloof, and so on, and no, I am not talking about myself. But Anne Hathaway is kind and nice, and I kept waiting for her mask to slip, for her to do something not nice, but she never did. Not from the moment she greeted me with the kind of muscular embrace usually reserved for a long-lost loved one.
“No, that’s Annie,” attests Gucci Westman, Hathaway’s frequent makeup artist and friend, known as “Auntie Gucci” to Hathaway’s sons Jonathan, nine, and Jack, five. “Like, she doesn’t gossip. It just doesn’t occur to her to be catty—and then you don’t want to be catty around her. I don’t want to give the impression she’s not fun to hang out with,” Westman quickly adds, going on to say that she and Hathaway “have the best time” vintage shopping (in Japan, recently) and are often mulling home decor, which makes sense, inasmuch as Westman was the previous tenant of Hathaway’s Manhattan home. “She’s funny, she’s curious—that’s the main word I’d use to describe her. I just mean she looks for the good in people.”
“You see how she treats everyone—and it’s everyone—she’s so kind,” confirms Bradley Cooper, who got to know Hathaway when their Manhattan-based families wound up forming one of the world’s most glamorous COVID pods. “We started hanging out as parents, having dance parties with children in my kitchen, and I fell in love with both of them,” says Cooper, referring to Hathaway and her husband of a dozen years, Adam Shulman. He seems a bit in awe of their marriage, describing it as “an emblem for that kind of commitment,” in that they “enrich” each other. Which, sadly, is not terribly normal—though, according to Cooper, pretty much everything else about the Hathaway-Shulman household is. “I hate to use that word. But you’ve met Anne: She’s very present and grounded, I’ll put it that way. And kind,” he repeats, before allowing that Hathaway has daggers out in one regard: “She’s viciously intelligent.” Okay.
On meeting, Hathaway hugs me, compliments my perfume, identifies it as one she used to wear, then confesses that she’s an occasional late-night lurker on perfume Reddit. She insists on getting me water—herself. She invites me to sit next to her while she screams into Antonoff’s microphone. She peppers me with questions about my work, my life. And when she notices there’s a photo of the filmmaker Chantal Akerman on my tote bag, she flips out.
“No way. No way. Spooky action, this is crazy,” she says, eyes agog. “Because you have to understand, I just watched one of her films, Saute ma Ville, for the first time last night.” There’s a fair amount to unpack here. I’ll start with “spooky action.”
The phrase “spooky action at a distance” refers to quantum entanglement, wherein particles remote from each other are mysteriously linked. In Mother Mary, “Spooky Action” is the name of one of the titular pop star’s songs; it also describes the relationship between Hathaway’s Mary and Coel’s fashion designer character, Sam. (“A creative connection that’s also a spiritual connection, or maybe they’re the same thing,” is how Coel encapsulates it.) The reason for Hathaway flipping out, though, is that ever since she signed on to Mother Mary, her life has been pervaded by the uncanny—spooky action to which director Lowery also attests. “This film was a doorway into believing, yes, there’s more out there,” he says. I should note that neither Lowery nor Hathaway comes across as woo-woo. But on a regular basis now, Hathaway says she gets little pokes from the universe, like the coincidence of seeing Chantal Akerman’s face on my tote. Which she interprets as a prompt to watch more of Akerman’s films—in a theater, she clarifies. “Jeanne Dielman doesn’t seem like the kind of movie you watch at home, after the kids are in bed.”
There are ways, Hathaway admits, that she feels like a beginner at film, never mind that she’s been a familiar face at multiplexes since she was in her teens. A recent convert to the Criterion Channel, she’s playing catch-up on the art house greats. Her interest in cameras and lenses is new. And acting—even that’s terra incognita, her process evolving in a manner that dovetails with her self-discovery through dance.
“When I worked with James Gray on Armageddon Time, he’d say, ‘Don’t ever try to nail it,’ ” recalls Hathaway. Meaning, don’t plot out your performance; don’t target emotional beats. “And when you impose your shape on a performance, when there’s that scaffolding, it’s less risky,” she goes on to explain. “But what James wanted was a degree of transparency. And that experience—it was pivotal.”
Maybe it was working with Gray, maybe it was turning 40—they occurred one after the other—but something sprung loose in Hathaway in 2022. Consider a few of the next films she made: Eileen, in which she plays a queer-coded Hitchcockian bombshell with a dark secret; the May-December(ish) romance The Idea of You, which sees her climax on camera; and Mother Mary. Consider, as well, her relationship with the brand Versace, also cemented over this period: Has Anne Hathaway ever looked sexier or edgier than in that draped chain mail dress she wore to the Bvlgari High Jewelry launch in Venice two years ago, or modeling in the Versace Icons campaigns? Clearly, she’s been getting in touch with aspects of her libidinal self. Feeling, not thinking. Proprioception, speaking the language of the body, rather than using words. But that journey began well before she found herself in a dance studio with Vitale, trying to “crack open her thoracic.” To arrive there, she had to want to find what she had locked away inside.
Hathaway started working with her longtime stylist, Erin Walsh, when she was pregnant with her younger son, Jack. “It’s interesting to meet a woman at that moment in her life because she’s powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and also at the peak of a certain kind of embodiment,” Walsh says, going on to note that she sees similarities with Hathaway today. “I liken it to owning your sexuality, what it does when you step into that. She moves differently. That’s the easiest way to explain it.”
A woman who is in a moment of transition—powerful, vulnerable, embodied in a new way. Only now, she’s giving birth to herself.
I’ve been tiptoeing around this, but now I’ll just come out and say it: Mother Mary is a very weird movie. It’s produced by A24, features songs by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX, and the supporting cast includes FKA twigs, Hunter Schafer, and Kaia Gerber, so it is also a very cool movie, but be forewarned, if you’re anticipating a fictionalized version of Miss Americana, or something like that, forget it. Much of the story turns on the making of a dress—which is spectacular—and most of the film is just Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel hanging out in a barn. There are also concert sequences that pay off Hathaway’s dance training (and show off Bina Daigeler’s next-level costume design), as well as a couple demented flashbacks. But really, the movie is made out of whatever magic Hathaway, Coel, and Lowery managed to conjure in that 13th-century barn near Bonn, day after day after day after day. It’s possible that everyone on the shoot went temporarily, mildly insane.
“It felt like shooting Apocalypse Now,” says Lowery of a pivotal sequence near the end of the film. “At one point Annie broke down and said, ‘I have to apologize, because I think what’s going to come out of me will hurt you.’ And Michaela took her hands and said, ‘I love you, I trust you,’ ” Lowery recalls. “We were in various stages of that for about a week, shooting that scene.”
“David’s writing is so vivid—we were forced into an intensity,” says Coel, who blew off steam by going to Cologne’s techno clubs. Eventually, she convinced Hathaway to join her. “It’s very brave work that she’s done. Look at that dance in the barn—it’s scary,” she adds, referring to one of the film’s arresting moments, a solo performance by Hathaway of surpassing emotional nudity. “The physicality she had to learn in preparation for this job—and it’s not just us in the barn, it’s the crew, it’s the producers, and so of course this day was terrifying, a little monster on her shoulder, but no one realized until after the first take. And then to keep doing it—take after take. That requires a lot of strength. Gallons and tons.”
“The crew, these massive German men, they all broke into tears when she was done,” recalls Vitale, who choreographed the dance. “It was the craziest day. I mean, everyone got challenged. But it made us all super close. It’s like David started a cult by accident.”
Call it the spooky-action cult. According to Vitale, she, Hathaway, Coel, Schafer, twigs, and Gerber maintain their Mother Mary group chat. Maybe they discuss the stuff everyone clammed up about when they talked to me. I don’t mean they went silent about anything specific—more like there’s a general air of “What happened on Mother Mary stays on Mother Mary.” At a certain point, conversations hit a wall, or, as in my wonderful chat with costume designer Daigeler, U-turn back to friendlier subjects, like getting Iris van Herpen to design the film’s all-important frock, or Issey Miyake references in the pleating.
The craziest fact I did manage to learn about the making of Mother Mary is that zero songs were ready to go at the time shooting commenced. As in, Hathaway had no idea what this fictional global pop star she was playing sounded like.
.png)
She knew what she looked like, thanks to Lowery and Daigeler’s vision and her own contribution of “blond with fried roots.” And she grasped how Mother Mary fit into the zeitgeist, blurring the line between pop idol and actual deity, and she could imagine the character’s internal conflicts, as they were adjacent to ones she herself had navigated, coming of age in the public eye. Where is the boundary between public and private? Between the life and the art? But music? No.
“It was so confusing,” says Hathaway, with the glow of someone who has been surprised with an extraordinary gift. And that’s how she means it. “I had to learn…. Because if I’d had the music a year before we ever turned a camera on, I would have tattooed every note of it on my soul, and there would have been a whole process, very specific. And that was not available to me. In the end,” she continues, “I am very grateful I could not take control.”
It seems to have been that dance in the barn that locked the Mother Mary sound into place. As Charli XCX explains in an email, she and Antonoff were looking at footage from the shoot, and its gothic, “almost Poe-like” tone had already begun to shift their direction; then they saw the dance number. “And Anne’s movement was super graphic, very thrashing and jerky and bold in this super magical and scary way,” Charli writes. “It felt volatile and gripping, so Jack and I went away and thought about that.”
So, in a sense, you might say Hathaway cowrote her Mother Mary songs. Or at the very least, inspired a few of the screams.
It was too nice to stay indoors, so Hathaway and I decided to walk to Adorama, a camera shop in Chelsea. She’s been getting into photography—tinkering for now, though she likes the idea of wandering the streets with a vintage Rolleiflex, the camera Vivian Maier used, snapping candids while no one’s looking. Fat chance. On the 15-minute trek over she was asked for three autographs and two selfies—she obliged, very nicely, of course—and we also got papped. This while she was doing her best to be discreet—bug-eye sunglasses, baseball cap. Anne Hathaway has been famous for a long time.
Indeed, Hathaway’s 25 years of celebrity were a key reason Lowery wanted her for Mother Mary: She is nearly unique among actresses of her age range and stature in being able to bring a certain iconic aura to the role. Lowery’s intention was to subvert and manipulate that aura. But there are plenty of people—36 million following Hathaway on Instagram, to start—who very much like Anne Hathaway, star, and who want her to sparkle just as she always has. Vivacious, Valentino-glam Anne. And Hathaway isn’t opposed to that, up to a point. She is still close to Valentino and his partner, Giancarlo Giammetti; she will undoubtedly wear the label again. Two of the upcoming films on her slate, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Princess Diaries 3, see her reprising beloved roles. She’s also reteaming with the Idea of You director Michael Showalter for the thriller Verity, based on Colleen Hoover’s bestseller, and reuniting with her Interstellar director Christopher Nolan to take one of the starriest roles in his very starry adaptation of The Odyssey. (Other key cast includes Matt Damon, Tom Holland, and Zendaya.) This is all stuff she knows how to do. What she also wants are more opportunities to submit—her word—to the unknown. To begin, and begin, and begin.
“She’s a curious person and she’s still learning and growing, and you have to be sort of humble to come in with that attitude,” says Showalter. “Which is refreshing in an A-list actor. And that is your first impression: star. She’s very glamorous.” Once you get past the polish and the poise and the buoyancy, however, Showalter goes on to explain, “there’s a whole other side to her most people don’t get to see. And it’s intrinsic to who she is. It fills out the picture.”
Here’s some stuff you might not know about Anne Hathaway. It’s not the stuff Showalter is talking about, just some things I’ve learned or observed. She played basketball growing up and she’s crazy about the Knicks. Like, so crazy that the closest she came to being not-nice to me was furrowing her brow in grave disappointment that I wasn’t following the Knicks’ exciting postseason run. Leisure-wise, “hanging out” is mostly what she likes to do: chill with her kids, her husband, her friends. “Uno games, baking when there’s time, teaching the kids to dribble a basketball in the apartment without upsetting the neighbors….” This information came to me in the form of what seems to be another of her great leisure pursuits: text messaging. That’s a joke, sort of. She’s insanely busy at the moment so a lot of her life, I’m guessing, is mediated through her phone. But when Hathaway is home, she’s “so, so grateful [her] husband is a great cook and an early riser.” (Among his many other wonderful qualities, she takes pains to note.) There’s no breaking news here. The news is the way she’s breathing it all in.
It was when I met Hathaway at the recording studio that she’d first mentioned her mother’s singing voice; according to Hathaway, she can really belt. And growing up in New Jersey, she’d always been frustrated that she couldn’t produce the same “effortless, powerful sound.” Later, packing up for our field trip to the camera store, she told me about her childhood forays into the world of orchestral music, a serious pursuit “until acting swallowed everything.” Right from the start, she wanted to play the trumpet. Her mother said no. “And I said, Why? And she said because of my braces. She said, You can play flute. And I told her, But I don’t like the flute….”
For a year, Hathaway was made to play flute. “It was awful. And I was bad. And at the end of the year I went to my teacher and explained my predicament and asked, Is it too late to switch if I can convince my mom?” She continues talking as she slips into incognito mode—sunglasses, cap. “And he said, Well, there’s summer school. And so I go home and I lay out this whole plan to my mom, and finally she realized, I really did mean it, I just wanted to play trumpet—am I shouting?” She’s not, but she apologizes anyway.
“It’s good this room is soundproof,” Hathaway adds with a laugh, tapping the foam padding on the wall with a slender, manicured finger before walking out the door. “I get passionate and then I get loud.”
In this story: hair, Orlando Pita; makeup, Gucci Westman; manicurist, Jin Soon Choi; tailors, Raul Zevallos and Matthew Neff for Carol Ai Studio. Produced by AL Studio. Set Design: Mary Howard. Special thanks to Central Park Conservancy, to 610 Loft Garden at Rockefeller Center, and The Bouwerie.
The August issue is here featuring Anne Hathaway. Subscribe to Vogue.
