Queen Anne

Anne Hathaway has become a style icon to gen Z-and embraced who she is after years of self-recrimination and internet noise. With the racy romance the idea of you hitting theaters, the Oscar winner talks about living out loud

- By Julie Miller. Photographed by Norman Jean Roy

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.”

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.”