It’s hard to imagine a successful actress like Anne Hathaway feeling insecure. Ever since her big screen debut back in 2001 in The Princess Diaries, Hathaway has had the opportunity to be part of some fantastic productions like Brokeback Mountain, The Devil Wears Prada and Rachel Getting Married, just to name a few. But still, like anyone who truly loves what they’re doing, the fear of these fantastic experiences fading away is only natural and, after an experience like One Day, it’s no wonder this issue became a topic of discussion during a recent roundtable interview.
Based on David Nicholls’ popular book, One Day stars Hathaway as Emma, a young woman who strikes up a friendship with Dexter (Jim Sturgess) after graduating from Edinburgh University on July 15th, 1988. From that year forward, the film visits the duo on ever July 15th, a process through which the audience watches their relationship grow, disintegrate and turn back around as they pursue their own dreams, their paths diverge and occasionally collide.
As much as Hathaway enjoys working on massive Hollywood productions like Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises, which you can read about right here, she also expressed her appreciation for this “honest, complex, beautifully drawn character.” One Day is a bit of a period piece and yes, it did involve Hathaway jumping into some unique and timely costumes, but there was also a great deal of character exploration far deeper than Emma’s clothes, accent and current environment. Read all about the extra lengths that Hathaway went to to bring this character to life in the interview below and be sure to catch the results when One Day hits theaters on August 19th.
When did you first read the novel?
Anne Hathaway: I read the novel after I read the script, which was in December 2009. Let’s see; I wrapped Love and Other Drugs, I had a two week panic that I was never going to work again, and then I got sent One Day and then it became a full frontal assault to get the part. So I read it I think around December – I can’t believe I remember these dates – I think I read it December 17th and by January 2nd I had gotten myself to London and I was sitting at a club talking with Lone, trying to explain to her why I ought to play Emma Morley and failing miserably; it was the worst meeting I ever had! [Laughs] I just, in desperation, wrote down a bunch of song titles for her to say, ‘I think this is where Emma and I overlap,’ and so I communicated through other people’s music. [Laughs]
You’re saying you had to do a selling job on this?
Oh yeah!
I’d like to bet you still had some other options on your plate, so what was it about this one that made you push so hard for it?
Well, it’s a really wonderful thing to find a character that’s honest and complex and beautifully drawn and Emma was the most honest, complex, beautifully drawn character that I’d found since Kim in Rachel Getting Married and I shot that in the fall of 2007. Clearly there’s some time between the ones that you find, so when you find it, I try to not leave any stone unturned until I’m given the opportunity. The problem is, is that then you get the opportunity and you’re like, “I got it! … Oh god! What am I going to do with it?” And then it becomes another set of emotions that you have to deal with.
Is Emma’s accent different work for you than other British accents that you’ve done?
Yeah. I’ve done standard RP a few times, in Alice and Wonderland and in Becoming Jane. With Emma, it was a regional dialect that evolves over 20 years because we evolve over time and I speak differently now than I did 10 years ago and so I needed to find a way to allow the accent to grow with her to reflect the time that she’d spent in London, to reflect her different jobs, where she’s been. And also I wanted to make sure that even though her accent would change that it reflected certain human truths. Like when people get drunk, their accent comes out, when people get angry, their accent comes out, which I had a lot of fun with, but when I saw the trailer cut together I was like, ‘Oh no! It sounds awful in this context!’ [Laughs] I’ve heard in the movie it works. [Whispering] I haven’t seen the movie yet.
Considering the focus of the film, do you think men and women can just be friends? I know you have a lot of gay male friends, but are you close to a lot of straight men as well?
[Laughs] Yeah, I have straight male friends, too, but the majority of my friends are gay men and I’ve never had any sexual tension with them, [laughs] which I consider to be a personal failing. I’, gonna play Judy Garland, you know? Gotta get on that. Yeah, I think that it’s possible to be friends, if you’re a straight woman to be friends with a straight guy and vice versa. And, yeah, sometimes there’s tension, it needn’t get in the way of friendship. Usually that dissipates into what it’s meant to be, which is a friendship. But I’m not the person to answer this question. I’ve been in a very rock solid relationship for three years and I’m a one-man woman, so I don’t really look at other men that way. I’m terribly boring and loyal and true blue and all that.
There’s chemistry between Dexter and Emma from day one, but there’s also quite a few impediments. Can you talk about those?
I don’t think that Emma and Dexter could have gotten together a day before they do. I think 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 that he needed to learn how to appreciate her and she needed to learn how to appreciate herself, and I think that was the most serious impediment.
Jim mentioned that you two got to know each other by swapping music. Do you remember any of the music that you gave him or that he gave you?
He totally got the short end of the stick! I gave him show tunes and he gave me this awesome indie rock music. He gave me a lot of Stone Roses. He loves the Stone Roses. And he turned me onto Elbow and for that I am enormously grateful. I think I turned him onto Bon Iver; maybe I’m selling myself short because Bon Iver was so important for me as Emma. I listened to him constantly throughout this.
And how about those songs you gave Lone?
A lot of Bon Iver. [Laughs] That album For Emma, Forever Ago, just that feeling of heartache. Do you know the Arcade Fire song Crown of Love? Well, the scene where Emma basically breaks up with Dex as a friend, I was just listening to that song again and again and again because – I don’t know. I can’t even articulate why, but that song just sends me into a tailspin. The song though that I thought really kind of captures Em and Dex particularly in their younger life is this song by the Dirty Projectors that David Byrne contributed on called “Knotty Pines.” I think it’s, ‘Like pine we’re tied together, two whole lengths of knotty pine with a couple of nails put right on through.’
You get to wear some fabulous costumes in the movie, especially how you change from period to period. Can you tell us about that and how you found the character through the clothes?
Emma’s not a girl who changes; she’s a girl who evolves. She knows who she is; she’s actually not trying to try on new personas. She’s trying to refine the one that she has, so it was really fun to work on her look. I think we have moments in our life and for me, the pinnacle of her beauty was when she’s in Paris. She’s so free and so herself and is really letting her romance flag fly. She’s in Paris, she’s cut off all of her hair, she’s wearing vintage that fits really well that I believed she probably even had tailored. [Laughs] It was fun to figure out where she ends up and then work back from there. Odile Dicks-Mireaux, the costume designer, and I, knew we would have these really fun conversations like, ‘What was the year that Emma found the right bra?’ [Laughs] Because you probably don’t know this, but as a girl, 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 open and doves fly through. [Laughs] It is a life changing moment!
Can you tell us about working with Lone? She’s from Denmark and like An Education, this has a very foreign feel to it.
I think One Day does feel like a European film. I think there’s something very universal about it. Maybe it doesn’t feel specifically European or American, it just feels like a film; how marvelous? Lone is one of the smartest, funniest people I’ve ever met. [Laughs] I hope she understands when I say she’s very Scandinavian, which means, to me, that she has an enormous and deep and rich emotional life that she keeps very very buttoned up, so her understanding of human emotion is vast, but she’s very stoic. Never cries, but is still wonderfully emotional, so she is therefore unconsciously hilarious.
Her understanding of Emma and Dexter, it was never straight on. She doesn’t look at any scene from an obvious angle. It’s always finding left of center ways and unexpected ways to communicate things. When we were doing the scene on the beach, for example, I walked away and I was trying to find a way to cover my butt and she goes, ‘Are you feeling nervous?’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m okay, but Emma, I think walking away from Dexter, is a little nervous to walk away from the boy that you like in a bathing suit in broad daylight.’ [Lone] was struggling with my decision. She goes, ‘What if you did a cartwheel?’ And by that point, I’d come to trust Lone so I was like, [enthusiastically] ‘What if I did a cartwheel?’ So then I decided to do a really bad cartwheel and it just turned out that that was a much more interesting way to communicate nervousness and being uncomfortable in your own skin and goofiness. It was like that everyday; how can we avoid the cliché?
You sound very sure of yourself, but also said something strange before about not working again.
Oh, dude, every actor – we’re all a mixture of arrogance and insecurity. I’m actually not a terribly confident person. I’m just very professional. [Laughs]
But you really felt worried after Love and Other Drugs?
It’s always. Worry comes with the territory of being an actor. You don’t come into this profession for the job security and there’s a lot of things at all times beyond your control. I’m playing at a pretty high level now and there’s a lot of things beyond your control. You can be doing fine work and people just decide they’re bored of you and then all of a sudden you don’t get the opportunity to do things. It makes you appreciate the things that you have because it’s so nice to have a script like this and a character like this, and it’s concrete and it’s, ‘Oh my gosh, this is what I get to pour myself into.’ The older I get, the more I appreciate these opportunities because I assume they’re going to become increasingly rare and so you just try to live in the middle of them every moment.