Anne Hathaway graces Vogue’s December 2020 cover looking absolutely gorgeous. In the accompanying interview, the 30-year-old actress talks about playing Fantine in ‘Les Misérables’, loosing weight for the part, but she also dishes on her wedding and designing her dress with Valentino.
Speaking about her short hair, Anne told the magazine that, “I love the short-haired lifestyle. It’s awesome that I was able to go for a hike right before I came here to meet you, quickly wash my hair, and now it’s dry.” “But I’m turning 30, and — I hope this isn’t obnoxious to say — I feel prettier, and much more myself. I guess I just feel much more satisfied with less now.”
On auditioning for ‘Les Misérables’, the actress admits that, “I knew that someone was going to have to go in there and do something pretty special to unseat me. Sometimes you leave a room and you feel like maybe you’ve left the door open a crack. This time, I knew that I had slammed it shut behind me.”
In order to become Fantine, Anne had to lose weight following a near-starvation diet. “I had to be obsessive about it — the idea was to look near death,” she recalls. “Looking back on the whole experience — and I don’t judge it in any way — it was definitely a little nuts. It was definitely a break with reality, but I think that’s who Fantine is anyway.”
Anne confesses that the cast was extremely close during the shooting. “Everybody was really pulling for each other on this,” Hathaway told Vogue. “And I think that came from the fact that we were all doing something so different and so potentially disastrous.”
Hathaway admits that readapting to everyday life was a rather difficult process. “I was in such a state of deprivation — physical and emotional. When I got home, I couldn’t react to the chaos of the world without being overwhelmed,” she says. “It took me weeks till I felt like myself again. The first time I really threw everything into a part, which was when I did Rachel Getting Married, there was no one waiting for me when I got back. This time, Adam was there. He gets what I do and who I am and supports me in it, and that’s pretty awesome.”
Anne married Adam Shulman in September. On her wedding, the actress says that, “Oh, my God, I had a blast. Our friends stayed and partied and danced till really late.” Her beautiful dress was designed by her good friend Valentino. “I begged him during the first fitting to make the train detachable. He looked at me and said, ‘But it is a dress, not a costume.’ The memory of creating it with him is something that I will treasure forever. He somehow read my mind and designed the dress that I’d always wanted.”
One of Anne’s future projects will be Song One, a drama in which Hathaway will play the sister of a young musician who gets hit by a taxi and goes into a coma. This will also be her debut as a producer. “It’s something that I always knew I wanted to do, but only recently have I felt confident enough,” she says.
Anne recalls that her mother’s last role before giving up her life as a professional actor was that of Fantine. “It made me think about how fiercely she loved us,” Hathaway says. “And now, of course, with me having this beyond-my-wildest-dreams success in my own career — and beyond the success, the joy I take just getting to be an actor — knowing what that must have been like for her to put that aside for the good of her children. Oh, my God. I want to be a mother, and I anticipate loving my children quite fiercely. I think about it all the time, though it’s a silly thing to think about because the kind of mother I’ll be depends on the kind of children I have. I can’t wait to meet them.”
Photos courtesy of VOGUE