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Anne Hathaway has given me a reading assignment. It'sa letter the soccer player Gabriel Jesus,who plays for Arsenal, published in December in the Players' Tribune about his recovery from a devastating ACL injury that sidelined him for most of the year. Jesus writes about how fatherhood and being in the moment with his young children helped him get through the brutally long rehabilitation process and how he has come out on the other side feeling stronger and more grateful than he ever could have imagined. Hathaway and her family are big Arsenal fans. (She played soccer growing up.) The letter was passed around in their group chat, and she wants me to read it before we speak. There's something about the notion of being able to embrace all of life's thorniness and letting it inform, or even enhance, what you do that has deeply resonated with her.
"It's the idea of there being opportunity inside of every moment, even the ones that are challenging, that seem like a crisis," Hathaway tells me when we meet the next day. "I've been on this journey as an actress for the majority of my life now, and I always think about it as two parts, and the first part made no room for life." The first part, I gather, refers to her blinders-on, rocket-ship ascent through Hollywood, becoming one of its most versatile actresses, and navigating life as an extremely famous person at an extremely young age. The second part involves parenthood, sobriety, a widening of the aperture to let more life in and be present for it. Now, she says, she has "entered a different place" and is "seeking harmony between the two."
Hathaway is also talking about work-life balance, a concept that actresses were asked about for decades and their male counterparts never were. It's an idea that may have reached its apex (or nadir, depending on how you look at it) in 2013, when Sheryl Sandberg told every woman tolean in,that they could "have it all," which mostly meant having a family and a full-throttle career and no time to feel adequate at any of it. For a while, everyone seemed to agree that this was a good thing. In other words, it's a very millennial notion for a very millennial (maybe even the most millennial?) movie star to be contemplating, having just reprised her most millennial role, as plucky Andy Sachs, in the highly anticipatedThe Devil Wears Prada 2.
Hathaway and I are ensconced in the back room in the back corner of a restaurant at New York's Mark Hotel. It is just before the holidays, and the posh Upper East Side institution is tastefully appointed with trimming and red ribbon—nothing too sparkly. I arrive early and overhear the couples gathered at the table across from me discover that they will all be in St. Moritz for Christmas.
I get the feeling the spot we're in may have played host to this kind of celebrity magazine interview before. Hathaway glides into the restaurant in a black top and pants and black sunglasses, her long, glossy hair down, looking, to me at least, unmistakably like the megastar that she is. But she sits across from me and with her back to the rest of the room, and no one seems to notice until we get up to leave. Up close, her face is somehow even more exquisite. The wide-set, expressive eyes and full lips that telegraph so boldly on screen seem almost delicate at this distance.
It's been 20 years since Hathaway starred in the originalThe Devil Wears Pradaas a recent graduate with serious journalistic aspirations who takes a job at fictional fashion magazineRunwayas an assistant to imperial editor in chief Miranda Priestly (played meme-ably by Meryl Streep), despite her disdain for something so frivolous as fashion. The movie made her the patron saint of earnest millennial ambition, and Hathaway returns to Andy Sachs at a time when both she and the culture have outgrown the fantasy of having it all.
Hathaway is now 43. She and her husband, producer Adam Shulman, have been married for 13 years and have two young boys, ages six and 10. She has made about 50 movies, some of them giant and blockbustery, some of them critically revered, and some of them—as she herself put it recently—"weird" or that "no one saw," like 2017'sColossal.One of them, 2012'sLes Misérables,earned her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Fantine. She tells me about having made a "conscious shift" in recent years to stop living her life as a "stressed person," which coincided with her decision to stop drinking.
"Before, there was this focus that was really uncompromising and uninterrupted," Hathaway says. "And I just can't tell you anymore what life is like without kids, but kids interrupt you all the time." Balance, she explains, is too fragile a concept. "My friends and I talk about it a lot, and we actually feel very defeated by the concept of balance," she says. "If the weight shifts in one direction, you then have to bounce it up on the other side, and we find that it winds us up as opposed to making us steady." Harmony, Hathaway theorizes, is more forgiving. "We're like, 'We seek to harmonize our life.'"
The world of magazines that serves as a backdrop for the firstThe Devil Wears Pradais slick and glamorous; the editor in chief has multiple assistants, and all of them are somehow dripping in Chanel and, naturally, Prada. This sequel is set in the current media landscape—one that I know from my lived experience is starkly different from what it was in 2006. Andy Sachs has returned toRunwayas the magazine's features editor (the role that usually oversees cover stories like this one).
"The characters are obviously 20 years along in their careers and at very different places, and the world of media is in a very different place," says the movie's director, David Frankel. "Andy has had a career in journalism that mirrors a lot of people's experiences in journalism these days." If that's true, then Andy has survived lots of rounds of layoffs. And ifThe Devil Wears Pradawas a bildungsroman with a makeover scene so aspirational that it inspired legions to work in fashion, the sequel, Frankel says, "is a movie about a woman in her 40s … [that's] about how you make peace with the world as you find it, not the world that you wish existed."
The other thing that is different aboutThe Devil Wears Prada 2is that it was made, as Hathaway puts it, "in view." The first movie was such an unknown quantity that fashion brands were initially hesitant to get on board and lend clothes.
This time, the cast attended actual fashion shows during Milan Fashion Week. That was a first for Meryl Streep, who says she was "struck by how not only beautiful and young—everyone seems young to me—but alarmingly thin the models were. … I thought that all had been addressed years ago. Annie clocked it too," Streep adds, "and she made a beeline to the producers about it, securing promises that the models in the show that we were putting together for our film would not be so skeletal! She's a stand-up girl."
Filming was a spectacle. "Even though we were aware of the impact of the first film two decades ago, I think none of us were prepared for the ambush of both goodwill and avid attention that engulfed us," says Streep. "We needed police barriers and crowd control. Buses of fans turned up, and paparazzi swarmed and in one case kept jumping in front of the camera and the shot and got in a kerfuffle with crew! Annie kept her cool, but I was unnerved."
During one scene, Hathaway took a spill down some steps after a heel snapped. "I was aware that I was falling, I was aware that I was being photographed, and I was also aware that, like, so many people on the crew, their hearts had just jumped up into their throat, so I needed to get up quickly to make sure they knew I was okay," she recalls. She jumped up immediately after, with her arms outstretched like a gymnast finishing a routine, to let everyone know she was okay. But privately, she told Frankel, "Oh no. I'm news."
Hathaway has been that kind of famous—where a stumble, literal or not, makes headlines—for most of her life. She tells me about having a conversation with an actor she reveres who told her, "We've watched you grow up." "I'd never thought about it like that," Hathaway says. "It's funny to have met people when you were a teenager and grown in plain sight."
Hathaway has come to lunch hungry. "Are you going to eat? Because I have to eat," she tells me. She has just come from a double workout—strength training and then Pilates—in preparation for the forthcoming Ron Howard military epicAlone at Dawn.This followed almost two years of intensive dance training forMother Mary,a David Lowery–directed A24 psychological thriller out this month in which she plays a broken-down pop star oppositeMichaela Coelas her erstwhile and resentful designer/image maker.
Coel notes that Hathaway's choice to connect with the "pain and sorrow" of the character surprised her. "I was preparing to hate Mother Mary a lot more than I could," she says. "She was soft, in a way that garnered empathy."
Hathaway was supposed to train for only six months, but a production delay meant that the two main dance scenes were shot a year apart, so she kept dancing. In the run-up to a key sequence in which her character dances, somewhat possessed, solo and without music, inside a 13th-century barn, Hathaway says she was dancing eight hours a day.
Hathaway took dance classes when she was a kid, but it didn't come as naturally to her as acting or even singing. "I couldn't quite figure out why there was no advancement," she says. "At a certain point, the dancers jump, right? And I was going all the time, and I couldn't jump in both senses of the word."
Even at that young age, Hathaway recalls assessing and recalibrating her future with a grown-up matter-of-factness. "I just remember having that conversation with myself and being like, 'Okay, well, I don't think you'll ever be a dancer, and your singing's fine, but I don't know that you're ever going to be a star vocalist.' So, I ruled out 'pop star' pretty early, but I found that acting kept opening to me." She adds, "I wasn't concerned that I couldn't keep up with Beyoncé, because she is Beyoncé." But then, forMother Mary,Hathaway had to become Beyoncé—or someone like her. "It was really, really humbling to have to deal with the limitations that my body had always had, that I'd accepted as part of my identity, but now they were no longer acceptable."
So she pushed herself. "Maybe other people would have been able to do it in a shorter amount of time or not have to train as hard, but I knew that it would hurt so much more if I hadn't just left it all on the floor. So at the end of it, I couldn't say, 'Well, yeah, I wish I'd done this better. I wish I'd done that better.' But I know I literally couldn't have worked harder."
Hathaway's work ethic is uncompromising. In betweenMother MaryandAlone at Dawn,she played Penelope in Christopher Nolan's forthcomingThe Odyssey,a set that Matt Damon, who plays Odysseus, has described as "harder than any other movie" he's ever done.
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WhileThe Devil Wears Prada 2might not seem as physically rigorous, Frankel notes that Hathaway "really carried the heavy, heavy load." "I mean, she's in every scene of this movie," he says, "so she really had to show up day after day, and she was tireless and uncomplaining and enthusiastic."
It's an approach to work that kids today might call a "grindset"—a kind of macabre, fanatical hustle—but considering Hathaway's age and the culture she grew up in, the earnestly optimistic ambition of the girlboss seems more apt. Hathaway and I are the exact same age, and the water we swam in encouraged us to climb the ladder, to take a seat at the table, and to smile the whole way through. Beyoncé affirmed that girls ran the world. Anything was possible as long as you were willing to work hard enough.
"I think I just knew from a young age that although I'm really lucky in so many ways and grew up with certain privileges, there wasn't, like, this big life that was just going to be handed to me," Hathaway says. "I've always just felt defined by my work ethic, because my skill set is what it is and I have to work with what I have, but how hard I can work is something that I can control. And so I never want to pull up short and feel like I could have worked harder. If I know that I'm working hard, I can live with who I am."
Mother Marywriter-director Lowery describes her as having "an attention to detail that is humbling. Sometimes I wouldn't see it until I was in the edit, looking at micro adjustments in tone and expression that were so specific that they revealed to me things that I was unaware of in my own writing." He adds, "A well-deployed half breath, a tremor in her lip, or a minute fluctuation of her levator palpebrae superioris—she knows how to calibrate the entirety of herself, physically, emotionally, to the scene at hand and to convey to the camera the breadth of feeling she's exhumed from it."
Frankel, who also directed Hathaway in the originalThe Devil Wears Prada,likens her to a race car. "She knows how to steer in and out of the turns even better than she did 20 years ago," he says.
Streep says time "has only deepened the substance of who Annie is, where she is aiming her life, and that I think shows up in the Andy you see on film."
In many ways, Hathaway is a perfect millennial avatar. Her mom was an actor who performed in regional theater productions, and she knew early on that she wanted to follow in her footsteps. She grew up the middle child and only girl of three children in Millburn, New Jersey, close enough to New York that she could take the train into the city to go on auditions for commercials. "I would go to school, and then I would get out at 2:22, and I would sprint to the train station," she recalls. Hathaway began doing that her freshman year in high school, while she was also performing with her town's local theater, Paper Mill Playhouse. At age 16, she landed a role on a family TV drama calledGet Realand moved to L.A. The following year, she booked the role of Princess Mia Thermopolis inThe Princess Diaries,the other duckling-to-swan role that, along with Andy Sachs, became a canonic cultural touchstone for a generation.
"I feel like I was, like, everybody's babysitter," Hathaway says. "And I was a child when I madeThe Princess Diaries.I was still a 22-year-old mess of a human when I madeThe Devil Wears Prada.And so, we've grown up together, and I'm so happy for them and how their lives are unfolding. Like, this crazy thing where people just graduate from high school and they just send me their graduation announcements. People send me their wedding invitations. It's so very sweet. And I feel bad, because I can never do anything with them, because I'm not Taylor Swift–level organized. Maybe someday."
A recent headline on Bloomberg declared that " 'burnout' feminism" is replacing the "girlboss, lean in era." There has been a collective reappraisal of our definition of and relationship to ambition. Now we're in the part where we realize the system was always rigged and that maybe the kind of hustle that was so valorized was always a little bit toxic.
Hathaway doesn't strike me as someone who has experienced burnout per se; her output remains prolific. She has five films due out this year and four more in the works (includingThe Princess Diaries 3). She talks a lot about gratitude—for her children, for her work, and for the Petrossian-caviar-egg concoction that arrives at our table, even though it was never ordered. (When I reconnect with Hathaway briefly at the Ralph Lauren runway show several weeks later, she tells me she's still thinking about that egg.)
But Hathaway also mentions her "short fuse" several times throughout our conversation and the work she's had to do to extend it. When she talks about filmingThe Devil Wears Prada 2and really embracing that top-of-the-call-sheet role, she tells me, "You can't have a good time at a party if the hostess is stressed or she's letting her stress show." She continues, "I just decided that it wasn't fair for me to move through my life as a stressed person. I don't want my kids to be around it, I don't want my friends to be around it, I don't want strangers to be around it, I don't want people I work with to be around it. So I've done a lot of work to figure out how to metabolize differently, so that way I don't feel overwhelmed by all that's coming at me and that I'm participating in, but I actually feel really excited by it."
Hathaway's eyes are intensely fixed as she tells me this. It's clear this is important to her, meaningful to her, though from an outsider's perspective or even from this brief close-up perspective, I've never gotten the impression that Hathaway ever behaved in a way that was perceptibly unsettling for anyone.
I have to do a little digging to find a clip from a 2012 press junket forLes Misérables,where an entertainment reporter named Kjersti Flaa asks Hathaway to sing her responses, and Hathaway is not really having it. She politely if curtly refuses, and when Flaa follows up with another question, Hathaway is dismissive. When the clip resurfaced, the outrage machine sprang into action. Hathaway sent Flaa an apology, which Flaa posted appreciatively about in a video hashtagged #cringe and #annehathaway.
"Cringe" is that crime millennials have been much maligned for, for the great offense of … parting our hair to the side? Tucking our shirts into skinny jeans? Being earnest? Having … hope? Gen Z has come of age in an era of middle-parted hair and a world on fire. It's understandable that one generation's earnestness is met with another's skepticism, but in that regard too, Hathaway seems to have been punished for it in an outsize way.
"I'm a human being," Hathaway says, "but I think it's important to … there has been a change." She credits part of this change to her decision to stop drinking several years ago. ("It all just works better for me without it.") But there's also a change that comes with age.
"I think that very often, conversations about aging presume that the first part of life is the happiest and the most fulfilling, and I don't necessarily think that's true," Hathaway says. "I wasn't expecting to find another gear at 40."
I point out that at 43, we are approaching the "aging cliff"—an accelerated burst of aging that occurs at 44, according to a 2024 study out of Stanford Medicine. Hathaway knows about it from reading Miranda July'sAll Fours.But does she think about it? I prod. Hollywood seems like one of the most hostile environments to get older in as a woman.
If Hathaway's friend group is focused on "harmony," mine is focused, at least some of the time, on our falling faces, and I admit that Hathaway's skin is held up as a North Star. I try, for the group chat, to figure out what's going on there. Hathaway credits not drinking and using Shiseido products (she's a brand ambassador); beyond that, she says she doesn't want to "discuss medical information." But she does offer this anecdote about being on vacation with her family.
"Some days you look in the mirror and you're just like, 'Not bad.' And some days you look in the mirror and you're like, 'What?' And I was having a 'What?' day," Hathaway tells me. "And you know how you have your aspirational swimsuit that you keep around, just in case you have a good day? And then you have your swimsuit that's got you no matter what? I accidentally packed the aspirational swimsuit. Which I then had to wear on a 'What?' day. So, I'm ready to have this great day with my family. And I am going to be in front of strangers, and people have phones. And all of the things. But my family is waiting for me. And I looked and I just went, 'What?' And then I looked again and I said, 'You are 43.' And looking at a 43-year-old body, I was like, 'Nice.' When I was expecting to see something that I am not, I felt insecure. But when I actually looked at what it actually is, I was okay with it."
And really, there isn't much other choice than to be okay with it all, even as it gets harder. Because it does, inevitably, as you get older, but that can be clarifying too: "I think you realize that worry should be reserved for the really big stuff."
Opening image: Jacket, Balenciaga. Vimini necklace, Bulgari.
Hair: Orlando Pita for Orlo Salon; makeup: Fulvia Farolfi for Chanel; manicure: Gina Eppolito for Londontown; production: VLM Productions
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