Hathaway

“That was not from me,” says Hathaway, 36, taking pains by telephone to point out that she didn’t intend to send up Crowe, her “Les Miserables” costar. “I’ve been to too many of Russell’s dinner parties to say that joke. And I said (to the filmmakers), ‘You know, Russell is kind of a pal.’ And they said, ‘Oh, he’ll love it.’ So I just did it.”

More than just doing it, Hathaway jumped in with both Louboutins, unleashing the comic barbs and a wide array of global accents in “The Hustle,” the bawdy comedy that pulls a gender swap on Steve Martin and Michael Caine’s 1988 comedy “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.”

Her “Princess Diaries” reputation (and Crowe) be damned, Hathaway gave the PG-13 comedy her all. She toiled with her dialogue coach to nail a campy German accent, a smidge of Australian, a broad Essex accent, even sign language. She’s sure Crowe will get over the barb (“I’m going to let him be surprised”), but the perfectionist wasn’t fully happy with her campy Aussie accent.

“I would actually like to apologize to Australia for that,” Hathaway says. “Josephine is mad and not trying to make the accent good or even believable. Thankfully, it’s only two lines.”

“Hustle” director Chris Addison takes the blame for the world of global accents, insisting that Hathaway’s Josephine have a cut-glass English accent, “because, really, no one does snobbery better than the British.” Yet his Oscar-winning star rose to the occasion and relished the crude comic moments.

“This isn’t what we might expect from Anne Hathaway,” Addison says. “But it’s another example to show she can do pretty much anything.”

Hathaway even worked with an American Sign Language instructor to learn the correct way for Josephine to give a vulgar screen tell-off: “Eat (expletive) and die.” You can take it to the bank that it was signed correctly.

“That was very important to get right. We went for it. We didn’t have a TV-friendly version of sign language.” she says, before laughing devilishly. “And they are really delightful gestures for the words.”

When Hathaway was pulled completely out of her element – such as a scene where she had to back up suggestively on the dance floor into a potential mark – she used a little libation help.

“If you had as much tequila in you as I had in me for that scene, you could have pulled it off,” she says. “It did help me to get through that day.”

She’ll have to find other means to get through these challenging moments. In January, she told Ellen DeGeneres that after a boozy Madagascar rum-bar excursion with her “Serenity” co-star Matthew McConaughey and his wife, Camila Alves, she’s quitting drinking until her son Jonathan, 3, is in college.

Naturally, she has a hack for faking it socially that would make her con-artist character proud.

“I take a champagne glass, put six drops of bitters in the bottom, then take cold sparkling water and slowly fill it up. At the end, you have something that looks like a Kir Royale, and you take it on the dance floor. Nobody questions you or tries to push drinks on you.”

The star heads for more familyfriendly terrain this summer, signing on to play the main human among Muppets in “The Sesame Street Movie” musical. This will be big news for her son (“‘Sesame Street’ is very big in our house right now”) and take Hathaway to a land of “heart-melting” creatures.

“I’ll play a Muppet-y human living among Muppets, so this is not a stretch for me,” says Hathaway, who performed a song with Big Bird and Snuffleupagus on the iconic children’s program in 2009.

“I wouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t a “Sesame Street” fan. It’s like, what’s wrong with you?”