Hathaway revels in ‘Hustle’ improv
In her lengthy career, Anne Hathaway has tackled stage and screen, playing everything from an actual princess to a Godzilla-like monster. She won so many awards for her performance in “Les Miserables” they had to invent new ones.
And on May 9, she added one more honor — a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
It comes at a busy time for Hathaway, who has spent the past year working on several anticipated film and TV projects. “It was a good year in terms of artistic growth,” she says of working with Oscar-nominated filmmakers including Todd Haynes and Dee Rees and playing a bipolar woman in an upcoming episode of John Carney’s musical series for Amazon, “Modern Love.”
Next up is “The Hustle,” a remake of “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” in which Hathaway and Rebel Wilson play con artists. Hathaway first heard about the project from writer Jac Schaeffer and her interest was immediately piqued. Hathaway says “The Hustle” was challenging because of her character’s British accent. “Improv is not my strong suit, especially when trying to stay in an accent,” she says.
The feminist aspect of the role appealed to the actress. “So many of her cons were about basically rising to the level of femininity that stupid men expect,” she says.
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She reveled in playing a character who turned to cons because she was good at it. “I talked to Jac and our director Chris Addison about the fact that she considers it to be a gender tax; anybody who plays the game the way the game is currently set up is getting ripped off . ... It’s a rigged system, so you shouldn’t feel bad for rigging the system back.”
Gender imbalance is something Hathaway has paid attention to for some time; from early in her career she’s made a point to seek out female directors and has worked with such filmmakers as Barbara Kopple, Nancy Meyers and Lone Scherfig. And she believes things have changed. “I used to get a list of directors and I’d say there’s no women and you’d hear, ‘Oh there just aren’t any that are right for this’ or ‘They don’t have the experience.’ You felt like you were screaming into the wind back then. There were so any harmful myths that were in place,” she says. “It’s been such a satisfying thing the last year and a half to watch people collectively put those myths to rest.
Coming up, Hathaway stars in Rees’ “Mudbound” follow-up “The Last Thing He Wanted,” adapted from the Joan Didion novel, as a reporter who cares for her ailing father.
“Dee is so insanely good, she’s the real deal,” Hathaway raves, while adding the character was like nothing she’s played before. “She’s so enraged and she wants to live as much as she wants to die. She’s a fighter with a death wish.”