This is Anne Hathaway as you have never seen her before: the Hollywood star unleashed her wild side for the June issue shoot at the Mark Hotel in New York, wearing a sequinned Giorgio Armani dress and dripping in Buccellati diamonds for the cover, with a dramatic beauty look to match.
Hathaway was also unrecognisable when Helena de Bertodano met the Oscar-winner at an unassuming Korean restaurant in New York for our cover interview, wearing a low-slung black leather cap with her nose in a book (Sisters in Spirit: The Iroquois Influence on Early American Feministsby Sally Roesch Wagner). Famous for half of her life since her breakout role as Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries aged 18, Hathaway talked about her experiences in Hollywood so far, and what it feels now she’s 36.
‘I was always told that once I turned 35 I would turn into a pumpkin and never get a good part again,’ she says about Hollywood’s ageism. ‘It makes me sad that the world tells me my skin is somehow less valuable than it used to be, but I don’t listen and I don’t agree. I get so tickled by being invited to the show.’
Elsewhere in the interview she's open about her struggle with alcohol and her decision to stop drinking last year, explaining that she just can’t do moderation: ‘My issue is I just love it. So. Much. But the way I do it makes me unavailable for my son. My last hangover lasted for five days. I’d earned it: it was a day drinking session with friends that went into an evening birthday party with one of my drinking buddies. I will never be that person who can nurse a glass of wine throughout an entire evening.’
She has a sense of humour about giving up drinking though, joking that if she wasn’t an actress she would have been ‘in the gutter’, before pausing to give it more thought. ‘I could have seen myself being a teacher. Or going into the military. Or being some kind of do-gooder with a death wish. But more likely than anything else I would have been an alcoholic,’ she jokes.
On the flip side, at the same time as giving up alcohol, she’s stopped being vegan – and it’s all down to Matt Damon. While shooting Interstellar in Iceland, the co-stars dined out with Hathaway’s husband Adam Shulman at a Michelin-star restaurant, and when Damon said he’d have whatever the chef wanted to serve him, Hathaway caved: ‘So then I was the only chick and I’m the vegan and everyone’s just going with the flow. So I asked [she puts on a small embarrassed voice]: “Is your fish local?” And they said: “Do you see that fjord?” So I had a piece of salmon and my brain felt like a computer rebooting.’
Popular amongst her peers, she is still in touch with a lot of former co-stars, including Michael Caine, who frequently gives her marriage advice: ‘Michael and I don’t really have a ring-you-up sort of relationship. But he’s always very warm and lovely when we run into each other. He gives me marriage advice. Separate bathrooms. When he told me that, I laughed and he looked at me and said, “I’m serious, it’s such an important part of the marriage.”’
The June issue is on newsstands on Thursday 25th April.
