SerpApi.Org
One of the biggest compliments I can pay Anne Hathaway is that in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, she delivers lines like, “Those stories are true. Our civilization is collapsing,” with not only a straight face but utter commitment. As Penelope, Hathaway plays yet another of Nolan’s long-suffering female characters—at least this wife is alive—but manages to locate a full human being mostly absent in the script itself. That she does this while mostly trading dialogue with a totally lost and out-of-his-depth Tom Holland is nothing short of miraculous.
I actually like The Odyssey. It has all the pleasures and faults of Nolan’s work in abundance, with the former outweighing the latter. Whenever it toggles back to the suitor-beleaguered Ithaca, however, the movie sags. Penelope’s story is one of repetition—she weaves the burial shroud by day and undoes her work by night—and The Odyssey gets caught up in it like a ship in Charybdis. Every 20 minutes or so, we return to Penelope being stuck, Telemachus (Holland) callow, Eumaeus (John Leguizamo) ardently loyal, and Antinous (Robert Pattinson) sliming up the place with his arrogance like a Columbo murder suspect. Nolan, unable to inject real dramatic action, resorts to his timeworn tactic of having characters trade bumper-sticker-ready summations of the film’s thematic concerns. Somehow, Hathaway credibly reveals different facets of Penelope throughout this—now regal, now commanding, now set-upon, now conniving, now enraged, now yearning—and manages to keep our interest amid even the least intriguing bouts of palace intrigue.
Should this really surprise us? Hathaway was the only good thing about The Dark Knight Rises and managed to bring complexity to her role in Interstellar even though her character is there mostly to explain that the fifth dimension is … love. Hathaway has been famous around the world since she was a teenager. She won an Oscar at the age of 30. Yet today she seems perhaps a little underestimated. She’s a major movie star who rarely stars in a truly major movie, and she seems unable to escape the now-13-year-old widespread consensus that there was something deeply hateful about her. Somehow, Hathaway’s “theater kid” energy—hardworking, ambitious, emotionally florid, and maybe a little calculating—was so irksome that after she won an Oscar in 2013, we needed to have a national conversation about it, with a whole coinage (“Hathahaters”) to match. Everyone from CNN to the Globe and Mail got in on the game, wondering why she couldn’t just be chill like Jennifer Lawrence, or why she seemed so fake, or why there was just something off-putting about her.
What was off-putting about her, of course, was simply that she was a successful woman who worked very hard and actively pursued her goals. The whole affair—and, in particular, the pitting of her against Lawrence—was, as both Ann Friedman and Ta-Nehisi Coates (not to mention Slate) noted at the time, obviously sexist. But the fact that the sexism was so glaring didn’t make a difference. As Lena Dunham’s recent account of her public image in Famesick reminds us, the early 2010s were a time when even supposed feminist allies loved nothing more than taking down prominent women.
And so, rather than launching into a career like those enjoyed by J-Law or Jessica Chastain or Emma Stone, she’s become something else, something we need one of those compound German nouns to describe: not a journeywoman, not quite the kind of star who can generate blockbuster box office on her own, and also one of the most famous actors alive. For a woman who is so supposedly calculating, her post-Oscar filmography is a puzzling hodgepodge. This year, she will appear in four movies besides The Odyssey, and they range from a gratuitous retread of the film that made her a household name to a suburban dinosaur film to a Colleen Hoover adaptation directed by Michael Showalter to a two-hander in which she plays … a world-famous singer? These seem like the choices of a journeyman like Guy Pearce, rather than a leading lady whose films have grossed billions of dollars. Even when she does headline a major hit, she’s never the main attraction, perpetually playing a supporting role to a Sandra Bullock, Hugh Jackman, Steve Carell, or Matthew McConaughey. Even in the Devil Wears Prada movies, in which she is the protagonist, it’s Meryl Streep who’s the principal draw and the title character.
Before we go any further, I should probably mention that I know—or rather once knew—Anne Hathaway. We met when I was a senior at Vassar College and she a freshman. She had just appeared in the college’s annual Valentine’s Day production of The Vagina Monologues. Even then, Hathaway stood out from the other actors with a performance of incredible maturity, nuance, and lived-in naturalism. Her performance had actual beats and objectives and was delivered with a matter-of-fact charm that made her seem at least a decade older than she was. I ran into her in the library a week later and introduced myself, because I was confused by how good she was. It was then that I learned that she was going to be in a movie, and it was coming out that summer, and it starred Julie Andrews. I asked her the title. It was, of course, The Princess Diaries.
“Who do you play in it?” I said, expecting to learn that it was some minor friend of the protagonist.
“Oh, uh. I play the princess,” she said, the way I might explain that the sandwich I was eating was a turkey club.
The rest, I suppose, is history. We spoke a few more times. Like everyone else at Vassar who came into contact with her, I had a massive crush on her. I graduated; she became a movie star and dropped out. But two things about Hathaway have remained with me: the precocious precision of her performance at the Coal Bin on that particular V-Day, and the one time I saw her outside school, at the Poughkeepsie Metro North station, on our way back from New York City, talking on a phone and wearing a fashionable coat (in my memory, it’s a camel-hair overcoat), with full makeup and large sunglasses. I waved at her, and she seemed briefly confused as to who I was. It was like seeing Clark Kent without his glasses on, and prompted the same question: Which version is the real person, and which the secret identity?
In part due to how long I’ve spent writing about acting, I’m no longer sure there really is such a thing as a stable self. Instead, the self seems made up of a bunch of different faces that we show to various audiences, and when we are alone, we are the audience. But we also live in a world where authenticity has enormous currency. No one seems to question the authenticity of her performances—just watch her and Rosemarie DeWitt spar through pure passive-aggression in Rachel Getting Married, the movie that earned Hathway her first Oscar nomination, if you need a reminder of how real she can feel on camera—but her career has clearly been shaped by this gendered double standard about how genuine she truly is.
It’s almost as if Hathaway was born in the wrong era. Were she a child of the 1920s, her chameleonic approach to style, elevated elocution, and doe-eyed beauty could have been parlayed into a couple of decades of great studio pictures for audiences who didn’t expect stars to be just like them. Watching Brokeback Mountain, in which she plays the worldly and cynical wife of Jake Gyllenhaal’s closeted cowboy Jack Twist and dons a couple of very silly wigs to demonstrate the passing of time, I kept thinking of what she could’ve achieved with a master of melodrama like the director Douglas Sirk.
The makers of Eileen clearly saw this connection to Hollywood’s golden age, as they play with Hathaway’s noir signifiers and turn her into a failed femme fatale. As prison psychologist Rebecca Saint John, Hathaway plays a glamorous Manhattan transplant plunked down in rural Massachusetts. She’s a liberated woman, a bottle blonde who loves martinis, smokes like a chimney, and will give a man a beatdown if he doesn’t take no for an answer. Eileen is not a good film—as Hathaway’s character’s name might indicate, the screenplay is as silly as it is self-serious—but Hathaway’s performance is remarkable. She is a character who is always object, never subject, seen only through the point of view of Thomasin McKenzie’s Eileen. Hathaway shape-shifts under the camera’s gaze, slowly peeling the onion of Rebecca, gradually revealing the confused, frustrated, and somewhat inept figure hiding underneath the glossy Barbara Stanwyck exterior. Put that performance in a Billy Wilder film, and you have an actor we’d be studying in film class until the heat death of the universe.
If those films make it seem like Hathaway was born too late, Colossal, in which she plays a down-on-her-luck alcoholic freelance writer who discovers that she can control a kaiju that is destroying South Korea, feels ahead of its time. I kept thinking that if the movie were made in 2023, it would have been a Daniels-style quirky hit instead of an odd footnote in her résumé. Her performance in Colossal grounds a daffy concept in a complex, character-driven reality, one that allows the film to pivot from surreal comedy to serious meditation on shame and redemption as it reaches its climax. Were she born a decade later, then her striving, her precision, her early-career Oscar would have been welcomed by a Gen Z audience that understands that you must always be hustling if you want to get that bag.
Perhaps, then, the aughts and the early 2010s were also a particularly awful time to be an actress, and not only because Harvey Weinstein was rampaging his way through the industry. Trapped somewhere between the protections of the conservative studio filmmaking of the ’30s–’50s and true liberation, young actresses had to play the loyal wife, take their tops off to prove their seriousness, and slalom their way through a career where one wrong thing said into a microphone could mean career death. I’m not sure we’ve improved on this era all that much. Constance Wu, for example, had her rising stardom derailed by a single unrelatable series of tweets, and actresses still have to act surprised when they win their 25th award for playing the same role. As Hathaway ferociously declaims as Penelope, “In this world, a man does what he chooses. I do what I can.” The sentiment here may be complicated by the quote being delivered by a movie star playing a literal queen, but it still contains a kernel of truth.
Stardom requires that an actor have a persona in which we can invest. That personality doesn’t have to be positive—as the WWE knows, everyone loves a heel—but we do have to be able to be parasocially attached to the star and our perception of them. Their career choices and acting styles can then be narrativized as flowing from that personality, and it all becomes a self-reinforcing loop. This is how stardom has worked since the heyday of the studio system.
And you can play that game with Hathaway if you want, using a series of roles as a kind of narrative of herself and her career. In The Princess Diaries, she’s a normal girl thrust into the impossible and life-changing situation of becoming a national celebrity. In The Devil Wears Prada, she’s an up-and-coming people pleaser who tries too hard, so we enjoy watching Miranda Priestly cut her down. After Les Miserables, in which she’s a young woman who gets chewed up by the world and then spit out, comes, sure enough, the “Hathahate,” and after that she chooses as her comeback film Ocean’s 8, in which she plays a vapid, vain, fame-seeking actress who turns out to be a little bit smarter than everyone else thinks. In WeCrashed, she plays a woman who is, like Hathaway once was herself, romantically involved with a foreign fraudster; in The Idea of You, a people pleaser who learns how to be pleased; in Mother Mary, an artist needing to reinvent herself; in The Devil Wears Prada 2, a success still struggling to keep her integrity as her industry is hollowed out by the internet.
Yet there’s something too pat about this story. It leaves out two dozen or so films and smacks of confirmation bias. It’s a story we have to make up about her, in part because, having been burned by the press before, she is now far less forthcoming in interviews and junkets. Nowhere is this clearer than in one of her greatest performances, her 2024 longform interview with David Marchese in the New York Times, in which she manages to hold an iron grip on the conversation throughout, shutting down whole areas of inquiry with a word or two, and coaxing far more revealing stories out of her interviewer than vice versa. One thing she wants made very clear in that piece is that she no longer cares about ingratiating herself to the press. She has multiple years of sobriety under her belt, is no longer a people pleaser, and now is doing what she wants. The resulting films are a mixed bag, to be sure, but I can think of few women in their 40s whose IMDb pages aren’t either a wasteland or a grab bag of confusing and contradictory choices.
If you think Hathaway has a bad personality, you can find plenty of grist within that Q&A. And about that, the haters could be right! Certainly her “I had a dream and it came true” Oscar shtick was annoying. But what the discourse around her—and her response to it—makes clearer than anything is that, among her peers, she is not especially good at playing the game of advancing her own star persona. So much so that at this point she’d rather not bother playing it at all. As a star, then, she’s something of a failure—as an actress, however, her abilities are undeniable. Whether or not you find her “likable,” there’s plenty to like.
