A Life Less Ordinary

Anne Hathaway is known for her sunny, ever-positive disposition. But when a role as a tormented pop star demanded she explore her darker side, she didn't hold back. She talks to Maya Singer about learning to fail, giving up control, and coming out remade. Photographed by Annie Leibovitz.

- Annie Leibovitz

WOMEN OF THE HOUR Hathaway, wearing Givenchy by Sarah Burton (here and throughout this story: givenchy.​com), photographed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art with 19th-century masterworks by John Singer Sargent (LEFT) and Édouard Manet (RIGHT). Fashion Editor: Tabitha Simmons.

Anne Hathaway is screaming. Eyes wild, skin aflame. Cresting, her voice vaults to a frequency you figure could shatter glass. “How was that?” she asks Jack Antonoff, lowering her headphones. “Try another one?”

“Sure, let’s go again,” Antonoff replies, fiddling with various buttons and levers on his monumental recording console. “One more like that. Keep it frightening.”

“Got it: hounds of hell,” says Hathaway, nodding. Ever the diligent student. Then she turns to me, mischievous. “I have no idea where all this anger is coming from...”

Hathaway and Antonoff are spending this first balmy spring Saturday tucked away at a Manhattan studio because they are in the final stages of transforming famously plucky Anne Hathaway, movie star with a megawatt smile, into a moody pop diva. She's dropped her two sons off at Little League and come here in low-glam mode (Knicks jersey, jeans) to record songs for David Lowery’s upcoming film Mother Mary, in which Hathaway plays the title character—a sort of Gaga~Taylor Swift hybrid who is, uh, having a moment. And not “having a moment” in the sense of basking in the glow of public adoration, but something more like its opposite. Searching for her own center and finding only darkness, she has fled her tour and sought out the old friend (played by Michaela Coel) who helped craft her all-consuming public persona in the first place. It’s a strange, indelible film—which won't surprise anyone familiar with Lowery’s previous work (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story). Hathaway coveted the part, she says, and it wound up challenging her more than any previous role.