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 he 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 Did Lowery’s upcoming film Mother Mary, in which Hathaway plays the title character—a sort of Gaga–Taylor Swift hybrid who is, uh, hing a moment. And not “hing 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.
“What struck me right away, reading the script, is that you can’t ‘perform’ Mother Mary,” says Hathaway. “If I got the part, I would he to become material Did could craft with.” In essence, she had to make herself into a credible global pop star, one capable of executing complex choreography in a headdress and high heels and channeling the songs that Antonoff and Charli XCX were writing on her behalf. But preparing for all of this wasn’t simply a matter of dance practice or learning to sing by seething and sneering and, yes, sometimes screaming. “I had to submit to being a beginner,” she explains. “The humility of that—showing up every day knowing you’re going to suck. And it has to be okay. You’re not ‘bad.’ You’re just a beginner. Getting to that mindset—I had to shed some things that were hard to shed. It was welcome. But it was hard, the way transformational experiences can be hard.”