{"id":347198,"date":"2026-03-25T14:53:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T14:53:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/347198\/"},"modified":"2026-03-25T14:53:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-25T14:53:12","slug":"anne-hathaway-on-the-devil-wears-prada-2-mother-mary-and-hitting-her-stride-at-43","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/347198\/","title":{"rendered":"Anne Hathaway on The Devil Wears Prada 2, Mother Mary, and Hitting Her Stride at 43"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Estimated15 min read<\/p>\n

Anne Hathaway has given me a reading assignment. It\u2019s a letter the soccer player Gabriel Jesus,<\/a> who plays for Arsenal, published in December in the Players\u2019 Tribune about his recovery from a devastating ACL injury that sidelined him for most of the year. Jesus writes about how fatherhood and being in the moment with his young children helped him get through the brutally long rehabilitation process and how he has come out on the other side feeling stronger and more grateful than he ever could have imagined. Hathaway and her family are big Arsenal fans. (She played soccer growing up.) The letter was passed around in their group chat, and she wants me to read it before we speak. There\u2019s something about the notion of being able to embrace all of life\u2019s thorniness and letting it inform, or even enhance, what you do that has deeply resonated with her.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the idea of there being opportunity inside of every moment, even the ones that are challenging, that seem like a crisis,\u201d Hathaway tells me when we meet the next day. \u201cI\u2019ve been on this journey as an actress for the majority of my life now, and I always think about it as two parts, and the first part made no room for life.\u201d The first part, I gather, refers to her blinders-on, rocket-ship ascent through Hollywood, becoming one of its most versatile actresses, and navigating life as an extremely famous person at an extremely young age. The second part involves parenthood, sobriety, a widening of the aperture to let more life in and be present for it. Now, she says, she has \u201centered a different place\u201d and is \u201cseeking harmony between the two.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"stylized<\/p>\n

Hathaway is also talking about work-life balance, a concept that actresses were asked about for decades and their male counterparts never were. It\u2019s an idea that may have reached its apex (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) in 2013, when Sheryl Sandberg told every woman to lean in, that they could \u201chave it all,\u201d which mostly meant having a family and a full-throttle career and no time to feel adequate at any of it. For a while, everyone seemed to agree that this was a good thing. In other words, it\u2019s a very millennial notion for a very millennial (maybe even the most millennial?) movie star to be contemplating, having just reprised her most millennial role, as plucky Andy Sachs, in the highly anticipated The Devil Wears Prada 2.<\/p>\n

Hathaway and I are ensconced in the back room in the back corner of a restaurant at New York\u2019s Mark Hotel. It is just before the holidays, and the posh Upper East Side institution is tastefully appointed with trimming and red ribbon\u2014nothing too sparkly. I arrive early and overhear the couples gathered at the table across from me discover that they will all be in St. Moritz for Christmas.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I know that I\u2019m WORKING HARD, I can LIVE with WHO I AM.\u201d<\/p>\n

I get the feeling the spot we\u2019re in may have played host to this kind of celebrity magazine interview before. Hathaway glides into the restaurant in a black top and pants and black sunglasses, her long, glossy hair down, looking, to me at least, unmistakably like the megastar that she is. But she sits across from me and with her back to the rest of the room, and no one seems to notice until we get up to leave. Up close, her face is somehow even more exquisite. The wide-set, expressive eyes and full lips that telegraph so boldly on screen seem almost delicate at this distance.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been 20 years since Hathaway starred in the original The Devil Wears Prada as a recent graduate with serious journalistic aspirations who takes a job at fictional fashion magazine Runway as an assistant to imperial editor in chief Miranda Priestly (played meme-ably by Meryl Streep), despite her disdain for something so frivolous as fashion. The movie made her the patron saint of earnest millennial ambition, and Hathaway returns to Andy Sachs at a time when both she and the culture have outgrown the fantasy of having it all.<\/p>\n

\"fashion<\/p>\n

Hathaway is now 43. She and her husband, producer Adam Shulman, have been married for 13 years and have two young boys, ages six and 10. She has made about 50 movies, some of them giant and blockbustery, some of them critically revered, and some of them\u2014as she herself put it recently\u2014\u201cweird\u201d or that \u201cno one saw,\u201d like 2017\u2019s Colossal. One of them, 2012\u2019s Les Mis\u00e9rables, earned her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Fantine. She tells me about having made a \u201cconscious shift\u201d in recent years to stop living her life as a \u201cstressed person,\u201d which coincided with her decision to stop drinking.<\/p>\n

\u201cBefore, there was this focus that was really uncompromising and uninterrupted,\u201d Hathaway says. \u201cAnd I just can\u2019t tell you anymore what life is like without kids, but kids interrupt you all the time.\u201d Balance, she explains, is too fragile a concept. \u201cMy friends and I talk about it a lot, and we actually feel very defeated by the concept of balance,\u201d she says. \u201cIf the weight shifts in one direction, you then have to bounce it up on the other side, and we find that it winds us up as opposed to making us steady.\u201d Harmony, Hathaway theorizes, is more forgiving. \u201cWe\u2019re like, \u2018We seek to harmonize our life.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The world of magazines that serves as a backdrop for the first The Devil Wears Prada is slick and glamorous; the editor in chief has multiple assistants, and all of them are somehow dripping in Chanel and, naturally, Prada. This sequel is set in the current media landscape\u2014one that I know from my lived experience is starkly different from what it was in 2006. Andy Sachs has returned to Runway as the magazine\u2019s features editor (the role that usually oversees cover stories like this one).<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I WAS, like, everybody\u2019s BABYSITTER. We\u2019ve GROWN UP together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe characters are obviously 20 years along in their careers and at very different places, and the world of media is in a very different place,\u201d says the movie\u2019s director, David Frankel. \u201cAndy has had a career in journalism that mirrors a lot of people\u2019s experiences in journalism these days.\u201d If that\u2019s true, then Andy has survived lots of rounds of layoffs. And if The Devil Wears Prada was a bildungsroman with a makeover scene so aspirational that it inspired legions to work in fashion, the sequel, Frankel says, \u201cis a movie about a woman in her 40s \u2026 [that\u2019s] about how you make peace with the world as you find it, not the world that you wish existed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other thing that is different about The Devil Wears Prada 2 is that it was made, as Hathaway puts it, \u201cin view.\u201d The first movie was such an unknown quantity that fashion brands were initially hesitant to get on board and lend clothes.<\/p>\n

This time, the cast attended actual fashion shows during Milan Fashion Week. That was a first for Meryl Streep, who says she was \u201cstruck by how not only beautiful and young\u2014everyone seems young to me\u2014but alarmingly thin the models were. \u2026 I thought that all had been addressed years ago. Annie clocked it too,\u201d Streep adds, \u201cand she made a beeline to the producers about it, securing promises that the models in the show that we were putting together for our film would not be so skeletal! She\u2019s a stand-up girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"a\"fashion<\/p>\n

Filming was a spectacle. \u201cEven though we were aware of the impact of the first film two decades ago, I think none of us were prepared for the ambush of both goodwill and avid attention that engulfed us,\u201d says Streep. \u201cWe needed police barriers and crowd control. Buses of fans turned up, and paparazzi swarmed and in one case kept jumping in front of the camera and the shot and got in a kerfuffle with crew! Annie kept her cool, but I was unnerved.\u201d<\/p>\n

During one scene, Hathaway took a spill down some steps after a heel snapped. \u201cI was aware that I was falling, I was aware that I was being photographed, and I was also aware that, like, so many people on the crew, their hearts had just jumped up into their throat, so I needed to get up quickly to make sure they knew I was okay,\u201d she recalls. She jumped up immediately after, with her arms outstretched like a gymnast finishing a routine, to let everyone know she was okay. But privately, she told Frankel, \u201cOh no. I\u2019m news.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hathaway has been that kind of famous\u2014where a stumble, literal or not, makes headlines\u2014for most of her life. She tells me about having a conversation with an actor she reveres who told her, \u201cWe\u2019ve watched you grow up.\u201d \u201cI\u2019d never thought about it like that,\u201d Hathaway says. \u201cIt\u2019s funny to have met people when you were a teenager and grown in plain sight.\u201d
<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m NOT TAYLOR SWIFT\u2013level ORGANIZED. Maybe SOMEDAY.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hathaway has come to lunch hungry. \u201cAre you going to eat? Because I have to eat,\u201d she tells me. She has just come from a double workout\u2014strength training and then Pilates\u2014in preparation for the forthcoming Ron Howard military epic Alone at Dawn. This followed almost two years of intensive dance training for Mother Mary, a David Lowery\u2013directed A24 psychological thriller out this month in which she plays a broken-down pop star opposite Michaela Coel<\/a> as her erstwhile and resentful designer\/image maker.<\/p>\n

Coel notes that Hathaway\u2019s choice to connect with the \u201cpain and sorrow\u201d of the character surprised her. \u201cI was preparing to hate Mother Mary a lot more than I could,\u201d she says. \u201cShe was soft, in a way that garnered empathy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hathaway was supposed to train for only six months, but a production delay meant that the two main dance scenes were shot a year apart, so she kept dancing. In the run-up to a key sequence in which her character dances, somewhat possessed, solo and without music, inside a 13th-century barn, Hathaway says she was dancing eight hours a day.<\/p>\n

Hathaway took dance classes when she was a kid, but it didn\u2019t come as naturally to her as acting or even singing. \u201cI couldn\u2019t quite figure out why there was no advancement,\u201d she says. \u201cAt a certain point, the dancers jump, right? And I was going all the time, and I couldn\u2019t jump in both senses of the word.\u201d
<\/p>\n

\"fashion<\/p>\n

Even at that young age, Hathaway recalls assessing and recalibrating her future with a grown-up matter-of-factness. \u201cI just remember having that conversation with myself and being like, \u2018Okay, well, I don\u2019t think you\u2019ll ever be a dancer, and your singing\u2019s fine, but I don\u2019t know that you\u2019re ever going to be a star vocalist.\u2019 So, I ruled out \u2018pop star\u2019 pretty early, but I found that acting kept opening to me.\u201d She adds, \u201cI wasn\u2019t concerned that I couldn\u2019t keep up with Beyonc\u00e9, because she is Beyonc\u00e9.\u201d But then, for Mother Mary, Hathaway had to become Beyonc\u00e9\u2014or someone like her. \u201cIt was really, really humbling to have to deal with the limitations that my body had always had, that I\u2019d accepted as part of my identity, but now they were no longer acceptable.\u201d<\/p>\n

So she pushed herself. \u201cMaybe other people would have been able to do it in a shorter amount of time or not have to train as hard, but I knew that it would hurt so much more if I hadn\u2019t just left it all on the floor. So at the end of it, I couldn\u2019t say, \u2018Well, yeah, I wish I\u2019d done this better. I wish I\u2019d done that better.\u2019 But I know I literally couldn\u2019t have worked harder.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hathaway\u2019s work ethic is uncompromising. In between Mother Mary and Alone at Dawn, she played Penelope in Christopher Nolan\u2019s forthcoming The Odyssey, a set that Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, has described as \u201charder than any other movie\u201d he\u2019s ever done.
<\/p>\n

\"fashion<\/p>\n

While The Devil Wears Prada 2 might not seem as physically rigorous, Frankel notes that Hathaway \u201creally carried the heavy, heavy load.\u201d \u201cI mean, she\u2019s in every scene of this movie,\u201d he says, \u201cso she really had to show up day after day, and she was tireless and uncomplaining and enthusiastic.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an approach to work that kids today might call a \u201cgrindset\u201d\u2014a kind of macabre, fanatical hustle\u2014but considering Hathaway\u2019s age and the culture she grew up in, the earnestly optimistic ambition of the girlboss seems more apt. Hathaway and I are the exact same age, and the water we swam in encouraged us to climb the ladder, to take a seat at the table, and to smile the whole way through. Beyonc\u00e9 affirmed that girls ran the world. Anything was possible as long as you were willing to work hard enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I just knew from a young age that although I\u2019m really lucky in so many ways and grew up with certain privileges, there wasn\u2019t, like, this big life that was just going to be handed to me,\u201d Hathaway says. \u201cI\u2019ve always just felt defined by my work ethic, because my skill set is what it is and I have to work with what I have, but how hard I can work is something that I can control. And so I never want to pull up short and feel like I could have worked harder. If I know that I\u2019m working hard, I can live with who I am.\u201d
<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can\u2019t have a GOOD TIME at a PARTY if the hostess is STRESSED or she\u2019s letting her stress SHOW. I just DECIDED that it WASN\u2019T FAIR for me to move through MY LIFE as a STRESSED PERSON.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mother Mary writer-director Lowery describes her as having \u201can attention to detail that is humbling. Sometimes I wouldn\u2019t see it until I was in the edit, looking at micro adjustments in tone and expression that were so specific that they revealed to me things that I was unaware of in my own writing.\u201d He adds, \u201cA well-deployed half breath, a tremor in her lip, or a minute fluctuation of her levator palpebrae superioris\u2014she knows how to calibrate the entirety of herself, physically, emotionally, to the scene at hand and to convey to the camera the breadth of feeling she\u2019s exhumed from it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frankel, who also directed Hathaway in the original The Devil Wears Prada, likens her to a race car. \u201cShe knows how to steer in and out of the turns even better than she did 20 years ago,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Streep says time \u201chas only deepened the substance of who Annie is, where she is aiming her life, and that I think shows up in the Andy you see on film.\u201d<\/p>\n

In many ways, Hathaway is a perfect millennial avatar. Her mom was an actor who performed in regional theater productions, and she knew early on that she wanted to follow in her footsteps. She grew up the middle child and only girl of three children in Millburn, New Jersey, close enough to New York that she could take the train into the city to go on auditions for commercials. \u201cI would go to school, and then I would get out at 2:22, and I would sprint to the train station,\u201d she recalls. Hathaway began doing that her freshman year in high school, while she was also performing with her town\u2019s local theater, Paper Mill Playhouse. At age 16, she landed a role on a family TV drama called Get Real and moved to L.A. The following year, she booked the role of Princess Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries, the other duckling-to-swan role that, along with Andy Sachs, became a canonic cultural touchstone for a generation.
<\/p>\n

\"fashion\"portrait<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I was, like, everybody\u2019s babysitter,\u201d Hathaway says. \u201cAnd I was a child when I made The Princess Diaries. I was still a 22-year-old mess of a human when I made The Devil Wears Prada. And so, we\u2019ve grown up together, and I\u2019m so happy for them and how their lives are unfolding. Like, this crazy thing where people just graduate from high school and they just send me their graduation announcements. People send me their wedding invitations. It\u2019s so very sweet. And I feel bad, because I can never do anything with them, because I\u2019m not Taylor Swift\u2013level organized. Maybe someday.\u201d<\/p>\n

A recent headline on Bloomberg declared that \u201c \u2018burnout\u2019 feminism\u201d is replacing the \u201cgirlboss, lean in era.\u201d There has been a collective reappraisal of our definition of and relationship to ambition. Now we\u2019re in the part where we realize the system was always rigged and that maybe the kind of hustle that was so valorized was always a little bit toxic.<\/p>\n

Hathaway doesn\u2019t strike me as someone who has experienced burnout per se; her output remains prolific. She has five films due out this year and four more in the works (including The Princess Diaries 3). She talks a lot about gratitude\u2014for her children, for her work, and for the Petrossian-caviar-egg concoction that arrives at our table, even though it was never ordered. (When I reconnect with Hathaway briefly at the Ralph Lauren runway show several weeks later, she tells me she\u2019s still thinking about that egg.)
<\/p>\n

\u201cI wasn\u2019t EXPECTING to find another GEAR at 40.\u201d<\/p>\n

But Hathaway also mentions her \u201cshort fuse\u201d several times throughout our conversation and the work she\u2019s had to do to extend it. When she talks about filming The Devil Wears Prada 2 and really embracing that top-of-the-call-sheet role, she tells me, \u201cYou can\u2019t have a good time at a party if the hostess is stressed or she\u2019s letting her stress show.\u201d She continues, \u201cI just decided that it wasn\u2019t fair for me to move through my life as a stressed person. I don\u2019t want my kids to be around it, I don\u2019t want my friends to be around it, I don\u2019t want strangers to be around it, I don\u2019t want people I work with to be around it. So I\u2019ve done a lot of work to figure out how to metabolize differently, so that way I don\u2019t feel overwhelmed by all that\u2019s coming at me and that I\u2019m participating in, but I actually feel really excited by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hathaway\u2019s eyes are intensely fixed as she tells me this. It\u2019s clear this is important to her, meaningful to her, though from an outsider\u2019s perspective or even from this brief close-up perspective, I\u2019ve never gotten the impression that Hathaway ever behaved in a way that was perceptibly unsettling for anyone.<\/p>\n

I have to do a little digging to find a clip from a 2012 press junket for Les Mis\u00e9rables, where an entertainment reporter named Kjersti Flaa asks Hathaway to sing her responses, and Hathaway is not really having it. She politely if curtly refuses, and when Flaa follows up with another question, Hathaway is dismissive. When the clip resurfaced, the outrage machine sprang into action. Hathaway sent Flaa an apology, which Flaa posted appreciatively about in a video hashtagged #cringe and #annehathaway.<\/p>\n

\u201cCringe\u201d is that crime millennials have been much maligned for, for the great offense of \u2026 parting our hair to the side? Tucking our shirts into skinny jeans? Being earnest? Having \u2026 hope? Gen Z has come of age in an era of middle-parted hair and a world on fire. It\u2019s understandable that one generation\u2019s earnestness is met with another\u2019s skepticism, but in that regard too, Hathaway seems to have been punished for it in an outsize way.
<\/p>\n

\"fashion<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m a human being,\u201d Hathaway says, \u201cbut I think it\u2019s important to \u2026 there has been a change.\u201d She credits part of this change to her decision to stop drinking several years ago. (\u201cIt all just works better for me without it.\u201d) But there\u2019s also a change that comes with age.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that very often, conversations about aging presume that the first part of life is the happiest and the most fulfilling, and I don\u2019t necessarily think that\u2019s true,\u201d Hathaway says. \u201cI wasn\u2019t expecting to find another gear at 40.\u201d<\/p>\n

I point out that at 43, we are approaching the \u201caging cliff\u201d\u2014an accelerated burst of aging that occurs at 44, according to a 2024 study out of Stanford Medicine. Hathaway knows about it from reading Miranda July\u2019s All Fours. But does she think about it? I prod. Hollywood seems like one of the most hostile environments to get older in as a woman.<\/p>\n

If Hathaway\u2019s friend group is focused on \u201charmony,\u201d mine is focused, at least some of the time, on our falling faces, and I admit that Hathaway\u2019s skin is held up as a North Star. I try, for the group chat, to figure out what\u2019s going on there. Hathaway credits not drinking and using Shiseido products (she\u2019s a brand ambassador); beyond that, she says she doesn\u2019t want to \u201cdiscuss medical information.\u201d But she does offer this anecdote about being on vacation with her family.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome days you look in the mirror and you\u2019re just like, \u2018Not bad.\u2019 And some days you look in the mirror and you\u2019re like, \u2018What?\u2019 And I was having a \u2018What?\u2019 day,\u201d Hathaway tells me. \u201cAnd you know how you have your aspirational swimsuit that you keep around, just in case you have a good day? And then you have your swimsuit that\u2019s got you no matter what? I accidentally packed the aspirational swimsuit. Which I then had to wear on a \u2018What?\u2019 day. So, I\u2019m ready to have this great day with my family. And I am going to be in front of strangers, and people have phones. And all of the things. But my family is waiting for me. And I looked and I just went, \u2018What?\u2019 And then I looked again and I said, \u2018You are 43.\u2019 And looking at a 43-year-old body, I was like, \u2018Nice.\u2019 When I was expecting to see something that I am not, I felt insecure. But when I actually looked at what it actually is, I was okay with it.\u201d<\/p>\n

And really, there isn\u2019t much other choice than to be okay with it all, even as it gets harder. Because it does, inevitably, as you get older, but that can be clarifying too: \u201cI think you realize that worry should be reserved for the really big stuff.\u201d<\/p>\n

This story appears in the April issue of Harper\u2019s Bazaar<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Opening image: Jacket, Balenciaga. Vimini necklace, Bulgari. <\/p>\n

Hair: Orlando Pita for Orlo Salon; makeup: Fulvia Farolfi for Chanel; manicure: Gina Eppolito for Londontown; production: VLM Productions<\/p>\n

Cover Stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"15 min read Anne Hathaway has given me a reading assignment. It\u2019s a letter the soccer player Gabriel…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":347199,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,184645,2519,184642,8368,156,2120,2462,111,139,69,184641,184643,184644],"class_list":["post-347198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-celebrities","tag-collection-cover-stories","tag-content-type-feature","tag-contentid-fdb73749-6340-4643-85cd-f4070afc9c9c","tag-displaytype-long-form-article","tag-entertainment","tag-hasproduct-true","tag-locale-us","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-shorttitle-anne-hathaway-on-what-comes-after-having-it-all","tag-subsection-film","tag-tv-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347198","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347198"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347198\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/347199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347198"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347198"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347198"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}