It’s a grey Manhattan morning, however Anne Hathaway and I are sitting in a restaurant so dazzlingly white, it appears just like the afterlife scene in a film. The Oscar winner is heat and thoughtful. I arrive 10 minutes early and he or she is already seated, in a white sweater and pale blue denims, at a desk she thought can be finest for my recording functions. The restaurant’s menu is strictly plant-based—we order inexperienced chickpea hummus, market beets, and honeynut squash—however Hathaway’s eating regimen is just not. Later she’ll deadpan, “I believe everyone can agree I’ve the persona of a vegan.”
Hathaway has been well-known for extra years than she hasn’t and is properly acquainted with the web’s noisy opinions. She’s undergone an existential overhaul within the final 5 or so years—a interval that coincided with giving up alcohol, new motherhood, turning 40, and treating herself with extra grace. “That is the primary time I’ve identified myself this properly,” she’ll later clarify. “I don’t reside in what others consider me. I do know my very own thoughts and I’m related to my very own emotions.” Additionally: “I’m approach faster to giggle now.”
Her newfound readability is obvious on screens and purple carpets, the place she’s debuted a kaleidoscope of vivid colours and edgy silhouettes which have earned her Gen Z approval. Donatella Versace known as the previously pristine star “harmful, however attractive”—the last word praise for a Scorpio—and selected her to entrance her Icons marketing campaign. Hathaway accompanied the designer to final 12 months’s Met Gala, the place she was a best-dressed revelation in a tweed robe held collectively by pearls and security pins, à la Elizabeth Hurley, hair teased to ’90s supermodel heights. This Might, she stars in and produces Amazon’s adaptation of Robinne Lee’s sex-positive romance novel The Thought of You, wherein she performs a 40-year-old divorcée who finds love with a 24-year-old Harry Types–esque boy-band member (Nicholas Galitzine). Now 41, Hathaway tells me she’s proud to depict a totally realized lady experiencing her sexual bloom on the time of life when ladies are instructed they’ll develop into invisible.
The restaurant we’re in isn’t just vegan however “high-vibration,” that means that the meals is as near its pure state as doable. For Hathaway, reaching her personal excessive vibration is hard with a recorder operating. “The thought of something you say being picked to outline you is daunting,” she says. She’s not as critical as interviews make her appear, she tells me. However as we first begin speaking no less than, she’s positively cautious—current and engaged but in addition pausing to mentally scan solutions for web-flammable sound bites earlier than sharing them. “You don’t wish to say something to impress any sort of response, however you additionally don’t wish to say one thing that could possibly be misinterpreted,” she says as we start. “I’m feeling somewhat goldfishy.”
“What can we do to get out of that?” I say.
“I don’t know,” Hathaway says. She grabs my palms throughout the desk and says, “Let’s uncover it collectively.”
A waiter arrives with the beets—an summary portray of crushed purple and orange on a white plate. It’s essentially the most gorgeously offered root vegetable both of us has ever seen. “That’s stunning,” Hathaway says. “On the heels of being like, ‘No, I swear I’m not that earnest,’ I die over beets.”
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Years in the past, in one in every of their Key & Peele sketches in regards to the hilariously manic lodge valets, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele confronted all of the snark in regards to the lady they reverently known as “the Hathaways.” After seeing a tabloid article mocking the actor, Key and Peele exploded with open-mouthed, hyperspeed, strangled-voice indignation. They cited her résumé, sang their very own rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables, and requested an incisive rhetorical query: “Why would you be hatin’ on the Hathaways?! Assured lady in Hollywood whose sole character flaw is that she cares an excessive amount of?”
She definitely owns who she is. “I’m an intense particular person,” Hathaway says on the restaurant. We’re speaking about how, when she was a three-year-old in New Jersey, she noticed her mom play Eva Peron onstage and knew, in each cell of her being, that she needed to behave. “She’d come and see me in issues and focus with essentially the most rapt consideration you may think about,” her mom instructed a reporter a few years in the past. Hathaway’s mother and father—her father is a labor lawyer—tried to dissuade her from appearing professionally. As her mom put it, “My husband and I had seen completely good kids develop into little monsters.”
However Hathaway is just not simply talked out of issues she believes in. She took drama courses, understudied future Tony winner Laura Benanti in a manufacturing of Jane Eyre at 14, and had the chutzpah to jot down to an agent together with her headshot at 15. “You’ll be able to inform from that story I don’t do issues by half measure,” she tells me. “After I love one thing, I think about myself doing it to the hilt.” There was a fleeting second when Hathaway determined she needed to be a nun. “But it surely turned out which you can love God with out being a nun,” she says. (She later discovered you may also love God with out being a Catholic, leaving the Church due to its stance on homosexuality. As she as soon as instructed British GQ, “Why ought to I assist a company that has a restricted view of my beloved brother?”)