Colossal twists surprised Hathaway
Not just a romantic comedy and not just a monster movie, even its star was impressed
Critics and Internet commenters are fumbling over how to describe Colossal, the new sci-fi monster movie that resists being boiled down and placed under any label.
When asked how to explain the film (opening April 21), its star, Anne Hathaway, says she often doesn’t attempt to. Or she’ll drop its logline:
“Party girl with a heart of gold needs to dry out, goes home and doesn’t dry out, and when she gets drunk a giant monster terrorizes Seoul, South Korea.”
Then she’ll just let that hang there for a bit.
“And people either go, ‘OKKKK’ or they go, ‘Rad! I want to see that’ — and I kind of leave it at that,” the Oscar-winning actress tells the Star in a phone interview. She likes that it’s a tough film to squish into a box, she says, adding that she was delighted by how freely the story manages to just be itself.
Hathaway plays Gloria, an out-ofwork web writer with a drinking problem in New York who is dating a not-so-impressed Brit (Dan Stevens) when we meet her. She gets dumped and heads back to her hometown to put her life back together and reconnects with childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who hires her to work at his bar.
It seems like the set-up — and a familiar one — for a rom-com, but instead, things quickly get weird. The monster soon shows up in headlines and on the news after it starts wreaking havoc in Seoul. Gloria, petrified, eventually figures out that she’s actually in control of the monster that appears every time she gets wasted (which is often), and she wanders into a nearby park. And here, if you think that you know where the story is going, you’ll prob- ably be surprised once more.
However unusual Gloria’s path is in the story, Hathaway said her interest in the film grew from the connection she felt with the character.
“I felt a kinship with her; maybe we are not the exact same person, but we’ve stumbled in similar ways,” she said. “She grabbed me and then, as I kept reading, I couldn’t believe what I was reading, and it was just so fresh and like nothing I’ve ever read before, and that counts a lot for me.”
As the Internet is now discovering, Colossal gets deeper and darker than most people seemed to expect. And while the audiences do get to meet a gigantic monster, they’re also confronted with heavier issues alongside it.
“When I read it, I focused so much on the addiction story, the substance-abuse story, that some of the toxic masculinity I didn’t see until I saw the actors portray the parts,” Hathaway said. Suffice it to say, many of the characters in Colossal are not as they first seem.
“It’s a really good unexpected story that kind of comes out of nowhere and says some things and reflects (certain) truths about the place we are living in that are resonating with people,” Hathaway said.
The film was shot in Vancouver and Langley, B.C., when Hathaway was a few months pregnant, though the rest of world didn’t know it at the time. She is grateful for the way the crew there was able to accommodate her needs (things like extra editing to break up her fight scenes, so her heart rate didn’t get too high).
“I can’t tell you how grateful I was to the crew for letting me feel so protected on the set,” she said, noting that within an hour of being back in Los Angeles paparazzi had reported to the world that she was expecting.
“To have been able to be in Canada for two months and have that time just respected on a human level, I don’t know if I can tell you what that meant to me . . . I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a chance to say thank you properly.”
Hathaway said she enjoyed working with Sudeikis, who has been a friend of hers for almost a decade.
“I’ve never seen him given a role that’s asked so much of him before, and I think he just met every challenge in ways I honestly couldn’t have imagined and I think he gives such a fantastic performance in this,” she said.
Likewise, she enjoyed working with the film’s writer and director, Nacho Vigalondo, who she says “is now one of my favourite people.”
Colossal opens April 21 in theatres across Canada.