| Anne Hathaway Strips The Tiara To Show Her True Soul |
| Written by Christina M. Hinke | ||||||
| Wednesday, 06 September 2006 12:14 | ||||||
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It is not very often in the movie business that you find a young actor who is humble, refreshingly sweet, honest, who knows who she is and strives to make her mark based on that sense of self, and is not splayed across every tabloid for drug abuse or anorexia or whatever is the hottest irresponsible act of the moment. Anne Hathaway, at the budding age of 23, has it all figured out, even if she's still growing as an actor and a person. She is known for her role as Mia Thermopolis in "The Princess Diaries," but now that she is older she has made some strong choices in roles that will show the world that she is more than a teen queen of film. 
Anne Hathaway at the New York Premiere of "The Devil Wears Prada"
Hathaway as Andy Sachs in "The Devil Wears Prada"
Hathaway gets fed up
Q: You have had a real chance to work with some more complex projects since "The Princess Diaries." Was it kind of like, "Let's do this now"? AH: No. Considering that "The Princess Diaries" came out five years ago, I actually haven't done that many movies. I really wanted to wait and find roles that moved me. It just really had to do with me doing stuff that I believed in at that moment. I never gave any kind of credit to the whole theory of typecasting because I knew who I was before I made "The Princess Diaries" and I knew what I had to offer and I knew that I could always offer more than that film. I always wanted to go out there and kind of get back to my character actor's roots. Q: So then the nudity in "Brokeback Mountain" and in "Havoc" isn't sort of an "I'm grown up"? AH: No. Come on. You think I would do anything that obvious? That's pathetic. No. If "The Princess Diaries" had required me to be, I would've done it. It would've been the unrated version, but Julie and I would've popped our tops. Before I did "The Princess Diaries," when the script for "Traffic" came up, every young actress in Hollywood auditioned for that. In the original script it required nudity and I auditioned for it. It's not something that I had any issues with, but because I made these movies that were family films, they kind of appealed to a lot of people's moral sides. There's nothing wrong with that mind you. I think a lot of people assumed that those were my morals. And they're not. I'm very different than the characters that I played in those films. Now it's time for me to be me. Q: It's sort of interesting. Once upon a time in the '70s an actress doing nudity wasn't the biggest thing in the world and it happened all the time. But today there are whole Web sites devoted to you and nudity. AH: Are there? Q: Go Google. AH: Okay. I had no idea. There's a lot of horndogs in the world with a lot of time on their hands. But no, it really had nothing to do with it. The highest grossing film of all time, "Titanic," has an actress baring her breasts in it. I've never been uncomfortable with it. I saw the film, "All That Jazz," when I was eight. I didn't understand a lot of it, but nothing was shocking about it to me. I grew up studying classic painters. They certainly didn't shy away from nudes. I don't find anything morally reprehensible about it. I don't think it's degrading to kind of go to the lengths of what art demands. I think it is different to pose in a pair of hot pants on the cover of Stuff magazine. That's something I'm just not interested in doing. Q: Do you take feminist issues in mind when you choose a role? AH: It has a lot to do with why you choose roles, especially roles that require nudity. You don't want to do anything gratuitous that would allow yourself to be objectified. Everything has to have a reason and there has to be a very, certain story motivation for it in the text. Q: Do you ever choose your roles based on how many people might see the movie or how it might be rated? AH: No. No. The one time that I kind of did that, where I was just like, '"Oh, this movie will have such mass appeal. Wouldn't it be fun to do?" was "Ella Enchanted". And it had a $6 million opening weekend baby! It's a wonderful movie. I loved it. On DVD it's done incredibly well. It has replaced "The Princess Diaries" as a lot of people's favorite kind of kids' movie. But you can't do that. There's just no formula to it. At the end of the day, you need to be proud of your work, not proud of the business decisions you made. Q: Have you been pushed into roles? AH: No. I've been really lucky. I've never been pushed. I don't work with people who are seeking to profit off of me in an unhealthy way. I think you find that a lot in music industry, people have these images they have to adhere to. With me, what you see is what you get. The only time I felt trapped was around the time I did "Havoc," and people had such a negative reaction against the girl from "The Princess Diaries" doing "Havoc" and doing a topless scene. I just thought '"Oh my god, people are just dealing with these broad strokes. How did I let myself become the girl from "The Princess Diaries"?' It wasn't something anyone ever pushed me into. It was just something that happened. I was in an incredibly successful film. I didn't realize that I was so identifiable with it. I didn't realize people would pick up touchstone words like, topless and princess, and why they wouldn't go together. So I realized after that, that I was going to have to become an actress again, not be known as a genre actress. Q: "The Devil Wears Prada" seems like an adult version of "The Princess Diaries". Any concerns about that at all?AH: No, no, no, no. The characters are really so different . . . still the story of a girl learning to have confidence. And Andy is the story of a woman learning to make decisions, and I think probably if I weren't in it, there wouldn't be the comparisons so much. Actually there was one moment during the film when she goes to the benefit, where the script says the final touch in the whole outfit was the tiara, and I said I would only do it if when they put it on, Andy says, "fuck, no," and throws it against the wall (laughter). Sorry, my mom's going to kill me. She said, "forget it."
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