Anne Hathaway worried she'd gone "too far" in Eileen
In her Actors on Actors interview with Emily Blunt, Hathaway also said the Ottessa Moshfegh-penned film made her feel "braver" as an actor
This year, Variety’s annual Actors on Actors series has turned into an interesting exploration of which fears stars had to overcome to deliver a great performance—with an extra sprinkling of praise from the famous friend sitting across from them. For Mark Ruffalo, it was being completely naked on camera in Poor Things. (Don’t worry, he’s still very “bangable” according to Robert Downey Jr.) For Anne Hathaway, who participated in the series opposite her old The Devil Wears Prada co-star Emily Blunt, it was changing her signature brunette locks (even though she infamously had them cut off on camera in Les Misérables), and donning a fabricated accent for the psychosexual thriller, Eileen.
“I think I’ve gone too far this time,” Hathaway recalled saying to a friend while working on the film, in which she plays an alluring and mysterious psychologist named Rebecca. “Oh God, I’m blond and I invented an accent. I’m not basing it on anyone except for my own imagination. This is the way I saw her, and I feel like I’ve gone too far.”
Despite Hathaway’s reservations, the performance worked at least for Emily Blunt, who said her friend was “so sexy in this movie… it’s crazy.” (These actors really love talking about how hot each other are, huh!) She also shouted out how cool it was that Hathaway’s character opens a bottle of wine with a shoe in the movie, which does, objectively, sound pretty cool.
For Hathaway, none of this would have been possible without the support of director William Oldroyd, who she called “a giggle of a person” despite the fact that he’s apparently “delighted by darkness,” something that sounds like a major prerequisite for working on this particular film. “We would have so many complicated scenes to do, and somehow he would dilate time around us,” she said. “I would come out of scenes in a blackout thinking that we’d been filming for seven hours, and it had been 50 minutes. I had to trust him so much because I was stepping so far outside my comfort zone.”
Still, it sounds like it was all worth it in the end. “I enjoyed it,” Hathaway said of the process as a whole. “I feel braver now.”