Fear of success

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This article was published 14/08/2011 (5143 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK — It’s a surprise to have Anne Hathaway spilling out her insecurities. But it seems she’s a chronic worrier — an actress who fears every new role will be her last.

This, from a star who landed the coveted role of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, which she’s currently filming for director Christopher Nolan, who’s set to play Judy Garland in a screen biography, who’s about to open in One Day, the film adaptation of British novelist David Nicholls’ international bestseller about a relationship that takes two decades to come to fruition.

Yet here she is this morning, telling us about her anxieties. It’s as if The Princess Bride, The Devil Wears Prada, Brokeback Mountain, Rachel Getting Married and Love and Other Drugs never happened.

“Every actor feels it,” she says — the difference here being that she’s not afraid of saying so. “We’re all a mixture of arrogance and insecurity. I’m actually not a very confident person — I’m just very professional.”

She laughs at what she has just admitted. But she leaves no doubt she’s serious.

“Worry comes with the territory of being an actor. You don’t come into this profession for the job security. And there are a lot of things, at times, beyond your control.”

Furthermore, she suggests, success must not lead to complacency — because success actually makes you more vulnerable.

“I’m playing at a pretty high level now, so there are a lot of things beyond my control. You can be doing fine work, and people just decide that they’re bored with you — and all of a sudden you don’t get the opportunity to do things.”

Hathaway is talking with such calm, analytical assurance about the perils of her profession that you sense a contradiction here. How can someone so seemingly together really feel so vulnerable?

But she leaves no doubt that the vulnerability is there. For her, every good film opportunity — for example, the current One Day — comes as a gift.

“It makes you appreciate the things that you have, because it’s nice to have a script like this and a character like this. I think, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what I get to pour myself into!’ And the older I get, the more I appreciate these opportunities because I assume they’re going to become increasingly rare. So you just try to live in the middle of every moment.”

She also makes clear that with One Day, which opens Aug. 19, she had to fight for the role of Emma Morley, the principled working-class girl from Northern England who wants to make the world a better place but ends up learning some difficult truths about love and life.

The film begins on July 15, 1988 — St. Swithin’s Day — in Edinburgh. That date launches a friendship that will last a lifetime between Emma and Dexter Mayhew, a wealthy, self-absorbed, feckless charmer played by Jim Sturgess. It’s an often turbulent friendship, but one that ultimately survives wrong turns and emotional minefields to evolve into something more meaningful and profound.

David Nicholls, who wrote the screenplay from his own book, calls One Day a love story “about friendship and family, nostalgia and regret, and the way that our hopes and dreams don’t come true — at least not in the way we expect them to.” His script follows the structure of the novel, offering annual snapshots of the course of the Emma-Dexter relationship, each set on St. Swithin’s Day.

Hathaway first read the script in December 2009, and it came to her in the nick of time, because her dreaded insecurities were once more bubbling to the surface.

“I had wrapped Love and Other Drugs and had a two-week panic that I was never going to work again. Then I was sent One Day, and it became a full-frontal assault to get the part.”

By Jan. 7, she was in London, with the aim of convincing director Lone Scherfig (An Education) she was right for the part.

“I was sitting in a club somewhere in London, talking with Lone, trying to explain to her why I ought to play Emma Morley — and failing miserably. It was the worst meeting I’ve ever had.”

Hathaway’s personal selling job didn’t seem to be working — and it wasn’t just because she was an American wanting to play a quintessentially British character. But she persevered and thinks now that one big factor in eventually winning Scherfig over was her decision to name a list of her favourite song titles and suggesting that Emma would approve of them.

“Emma was the most honest, complex, beautifully drawn character I’d found since Rachel Getting Married,” Hathaway says. She was also fascinated by the way the story examines the difference between friendship and love, and she rejects the notion that it’s difficult for a man and a woman to just stay friends without wanting to take a relationship further.

“The majority of my friends are gay men, and I’ve never had any sexual tension with them!” she laughs. But she also has straight male friends and — “yeah, I think it’s possible with a straight woman to be friends with a straight guy and vice versa.

“But I’m not the person to answer these questions. I’ve been in a very rock-solid relationship for three years (to actor Adam Shulman), and I’m a one-man woman and don’t really look at other men that way. I’m terribly boring and loyal and true-blue and all that.”

However, she’s come to some solid conclusions about what happens to Dexter and Emma in the course of 20 years in the film.

“I don’t think Emma and Dexter could have gotten together a day before they did. They both had so much life to live and so many realizations to come to. Before they could be together honestly and openly, I think he needed to learn to appreciate her, and she needed to learn to appreciate herself. I think that was the most serious impediment.”

Hathaway loved charting Emma’s journey over two decades.

“Emma’s not a girl who changes; she’s a girl who evolves,” she says.

Not surprisingly, Emma’s changing wardrobe — distinctly dowdy at the beginning — signals this.

“Odile Dicks-Mireaux, the costume designer, and I had all these fun conversations — like, ‘What was the year that Emma found the right bra?’ “

Speaking for herself, Hathaway says this can be a crucial discovery for any woman.

“You have many, many years where you do not wear the right bra, and then one day you find it, and it’s like doors opening… a life-changing moment.”

 

— Postmedia News