Indeed, even as she struggles to force down a third of the omelet she’s ordered, Hathaway’s sadness is laced with a rather endearing wryness at the melodrama of it all. On the table, underneath her newspaper, sits a copy of Gandhi’s autobiography. “I’m reading that and When Things Fall Apart. Go figure,” she says. Though she recognizes the inanity of the media reports that attempt to villainize her, it’s clearly difficult for Hathaway to cut herself some slack. She’s prone to being hard on herself, to holding herself to high standards, to fretting. “On the scale of someone who’s really laid-back about stuff and someone who worries a lot,” she notes, “I fall more towards the latter.”
Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the whole affair is that it came in the midst of an emotional growth spurt for the Brooklyn-born, New Jersey–bred actress. No one is more cognizant of this shift than Hathaway, who speaks frankly about how she didn’t always carry off her ambition with grace. “I was not the most fun girl to be around,” she says about her time filming The Princess Diaries 2 at age 21. “It was a very young moment for me. God love the patient, wonderful Garry Marshall.” Marshall, who directed the original and the sequel, jovially says, “She was great in the first picture, when she didn’t know much of anything, but in the second picture, she was an expert. That often happens. She wanted to play something different by then; she didn’t want to keep the tiara on. I remember at a junket,” he adds, laughing, “she was talking Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, and Disney was getting nervous, and I said, ‘Annie, why don’t you talk about your hair a little; we’ll talk Nietzsche later.’ But that’s why I love Annie! When you look in her eyes, somebody’s always home, which is rare.”
Hathaway has done a lot of growing up since then, but nowhere more so than on the set of Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan Demme’s vérité-style film, out in October. It’s about a recovering drug addict named Kym, played by Hathaway, who leaves rehab for the weekend to attend her sister’s wedding. Demme became a close friend and mentor to Hathaway. “I was 17 when I made The Princess Diaries,” she says. “I was at the nucleus of such a large organism, and Garry [Marshall] made me feel that I was the most important person on set every day. And from there…sometimes when I would talk to adults, they would be taken aback by how forward I was. And I was very oblivious to it.” She recalls the moment when that changed. “One day on Rachel Getting Married, Jonathan altered something in the script, and I said, ‘Jonathan! Why did you change this?! It was better the other way and here’s A, B, C, D, E, F, G why!’ And he smiled at me and said, ‘Hey, Annie? Maybe instead of telling me why I’m wrong, you could ask me why I made the choice I made.’” With that response, she says, memories of herself being dismissive or abrasive on sets past came rushing back. “I instantly felt so ashamed,” she says. “I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to people, but that’s exactly what I had done for years.”
