It’s a gray Manhattan morning, but Anne Hathaway and I are sitting in a restaurant so dazzlingly white, it looks like the afterlife scene in a movie. The Oscar winner is warm and considerate. I arrive 10 minutes early and she is already seated, in a white sweater and pale blue jeans, at a table she thought would be best for my recording purposes. The restaurant’s menu is strictly plant-based—we order green chickpea hummus, market beets, and honeynut squash—but Hathaway’s diet is not. Later she’ll deadpan, “I think everybody can agree I have the personality of a vegan.”

Anne Hathaway wearing ChanelAnne Hathaway’s jacket, gloves, and belt by Chanel; bra and briefs by Atsuko Kudo; earrings by Bulgari; bracelets by Bulgari High Jewelry.PHOTOGRAPH BY NORMAN JEAN ROY; STYLED BY DEBORAH AFSHANI.
Hathaway has been famous for more years than she hasn’t and is well acquainted with the internet’s noisy opinions. She’s undergone an existential overhaul in the last five or so years—a period that coincided with giving up alcohol, new motherhood, turning 40, and treating herself with more grace. “This is the first time I’ve known myself this well,” she’ll later explain. “I don’t live in what others think of me. I know my own mind and I am connected to my own feelings.” Also: “I’m way quicker to laugh now.”

Her newfound clarity is evident on screens and red carpets, where she’s debuted a kaleidoscope of vivid colors and edgy silhouettes that have earned her Gen Z approval. Donatella Versace called the formerly pristine star “dangerous, but sexy”—the ultimate compliment for a Scorpio—and chose her to front her Icons campaign. Hathaway accompanied the designer to last year’s Met Gala, where she was a best-dressed revelation in a tweed gown held together by pearls and safety pins, à la Elizabeth Hurley, hair teased to ’90s supermodel heights. This May, she stars in and produces Amazon’s adaptation of Robinne Lee’s sex-positive romance novel The Idea of You, in which she plays a 40-year-old divorcée who finds love with a 24-year-old Harry Styles–esque boy-band member (Nicholas Galitzine). Now 41, Hathaway tells me she’s proud to depict a fully realized woman experiencing her sexual bloom at the time of life when women are told they’ll become invisible.

“PEOPLE WERE ADVISING ME THAT I ARMOR MYSELF AND KEEP A DISTANCE, AND THAT I HAVE TWO SELVES.… I DON’T DO IT THAT WAY.”

The restaurant we’re in is not just vegan but “high-vibration,” meaning that the food is as close to its natural state as possible. For Hathaway, reaching her own high vibration is tricky with a recorder running. “The idea of anything you say being picked to define you is daunting,” she says. She’s not as serious as interviews make her seem, she tells me. But as we first start talking at least, she’s definitely careful—present and engaged but also pausing to mentally scan answers for web-flammable sound bites before sharing them. “You don’t want to say anything to provoke any kind of reaction, but you also don’t want to say something that could be misinterpreted,” she says as we begin. “I’m feeling a little goldfishy.”

“What do we do to get out of that?” I say.

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“I have no idea,” Hathaway says. She grabs my hands across the table and says, “Let’s discover it together.”

A waiter arrives with the beets—an abstract painting of crushed purple and orange on a white plate. It’s the most gorgeously presented root vegetable either of us has ever seen. “That’s beautiful,” Hathaway says. “On the heels of being like, ‘No, I swear I’m not that earnest,’ I die over beets.”

Years ago, in one of their Key & Peele sketches about the hilariously manic hotel valets, Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele confronted all the snark about the woman they reverently referred to 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 own rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables, and asked an incisive rhetorical question: “Why would you be hatin’ on the Hathaways?! Confident woman in Hollywood whose sole character flaw is that she cares too much?”

She certainly owns who she is. “I’m an intense person,” Hathaway says at the restaurant. We’re talking about how, when she was a three-year-old in New Jersey, she saw her mother play Eva Peron onstage and knew, in every cell of her being, that she wanted to act. “She’d come and see me in things and concentrate with the most rapt attention you can imagine,” her mother told a reporter many years ago. Hathaway’s parents—her father is a labor lawyer—tried to dissuade her from acting professionally. As her mother put it, “My husband and I had seen perfectly nice children become little monsters.”

But Hathaway is not easily talked out of things she believes in. She took drama classes, understudied future Tony winner Laura Benanti in a production of Jane Eyre at 14, and had the chutzpah to write to an agent with her headshot at 15. “You can tell from that story I don’t do things by half measure,” she tells me. “When I love something, I imagine myself doing it to the hilt.” There was a fleeting moment when Hathaway decided she wanted to be a nun. “But it turned out that you can love God without being a nun,” she says. (She later learned you can also love God without being a Catholic, leaving the Church because of its stance on homosexuality. As she once told British GQ, “Why should I support an organization that has a limited view of my beloved brother?”)

Hathaway’s mother gave up acting to raise the kids, so the dream Hathaway dreamed was just to support herself as an actor. If she was successful, maybe someone might know her name. “The last thing in the world you expect is that it’s going to go this way,” she says. For 20-plus years, she has roamed expertly among genres. If you look at just the titles of her best movies, it’s hard to imagine what they have in common until you realize that it’s her: The Princess Diaries, Brokeback Mountain,The Devil Wears Prada, Rachel Getting Married, The Dark Knight Rises, Les Misérables, Interstellar,and (three greatly deserving indies) Colossal, Armageddon Time, and Eileen.

Hathaway goes all in on her characters. For her Oscar-winning turn in Les Misérables, she lost 25 pounds to play the desperate Fantine and suggested shaving her head after researching the time period and realizing it would be an authentic detail. She also requested more than 20 takes of “I Dreamed a Dream,” even though the director thought she’d nailed it on the fourth take. Hathaway tells me that sometimes while filming, she will be so in the zone that it’s like she leaves her body: “The truth is that you let go. You black out a little bit. You come up at the end and you’re like, ‘What just happened?’”

James Gray, who wrote and directed Armageddon Time, remembers Jonathan Demme raving about Hathaway after directing her in Rachel Getting Married 16 years ago. “He talked about how great, intense, and brilliantly committed she was,” he says. “He said, ‘This is someone you’re going to want to work with.’ ” Gray continues: “When you’re looking at actors, you’re looking for a level of commitment. It doesn’t mean they have all the answers. But it does mean that they will give themselves 100 percent to whatever they’re doing.” Gray cast Hathaway essentially to play his mother in the semi-autobiographical film and says she was so devoted that she tried to perfect his mom’s chicken cutlet recipe down to the way she dunked the poultry in the egg wash. “And by the way, Jeremy Strong and Tony Hopkins were the same way. They were willing to do anything for me. It makes me want to cry thinking about it now, because it’s very rare that you get that.”

Anne Hathaway wearing Mugler.
Corset by Mugler; briefs by Kiki de Montparnasse; shoes by Alaïa; gloves by Atsuko Kudo; necklace by Bulgari High Jewelry.
Michael Showalter, who made The Idea of You, says Hathaway cared about everything from the interior design of her character’s house to what pens she used. “She’s fiery,” he says. “She has deeply held feelings about things that can feel intractable. I’m a Gemini. Things change constantly for me. Once we put an astrological sign to it, that opened up the floodgates for us to communicate in a different way. I’m not joking. And I’m not an astrology guy, but even I was like, ‘Oh, my God. Of course. I understand you now. It’s just that you’re a Scorpio.’ ”

Well, yes and, as the saying goes. At least one reason Hathaway prepares so thoroughly for her roles is surprising and nonastrological. “I’d rather not be unseated on the day [of filming] by my anxiety,” she says. “Part of the way I can tell myself that I am okay is by having such a complete level of preparation that if I get a critical voice in my head, you can quiet it down by saying that you did everything you could to prepare.” Early in her career, she says, “I had a horrible anxiety attack and I was by myself and didn’t know what was happening. I certainly couldn’t tell anybody, and it was compounded by thinking I was keeping set waiting. Now I feel much safer going to someone in charge, pulling them to the side, and explaining, ‘I’m going through this right now.’ Most people will sit there with you for the 10 minutes it takes for you to come back down.”

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