The Anne Hathaway feature on the December VOGUE --www.vogue.com/magazine/article/leap-of-faith-anne-hathaway/#1Leap of Faith: Anne Hathaway
by Adam Green | photographed by Annie Leibovitz
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Newly married and at the top of her game, Anne Hathaway takes on the role she's been waiting to play her entire life.
The last time I saw Anne Hathaway, she was channeling Audrey Hepburn at the fabled Paris nightspot Maxim’s, draped in satin and diamonds, her lustrous tresses swept up in a French twist as Mario Testino photographed her for these pages. Now, two years later, on a bitter night along the docks of Montreuil-sur-Mer, things couldn’t be more different. Hathaway is pale and consumptively thin, her hair chopped short and two of her teeth missing; she sits huddled on the cold, wet ground, weeping as her character, one of Victor Hugo’s great tragic heroines, prepares to sell herself into prostitution.
As you may have guessed, the pier on which Hathaway is about to give her body to a Gallic seaman for a few francs is, in fact, a soundstage at Pinewood Studios, outside London, where the feverishly awaited big-screen adaptation of the international pop-opera phenomenon Les Misérables (based on Hugo’s classic doorstopper) is filming. Best known as the home base of 007, Pinewood has been taken over by the likes of Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Eddie Redmayne, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen, and Helena Bonham Carter (not to mention Hathaway), decked out in costume designer Paco Delgado’s nineteenth-century finery, answering e-mails on iPhones, going over tricky passages from songs, or conferring with their director, Tom Hooper, a 2011 Oscar winner for The King’s Speech. It’s a remarkable collection of talent, guaranteed to give Les Misérables a kind of big-ticket glamour when it opens on Christmas day.
In the meantime, Hooper and Co. are on production designer Eve Stewart’s sprawling set—squat, sooty brick buildings; rotting hulls of massive ships; and many, many barrels of dead fish, beneath lowering skies out of a Turner seascape—shooting the number “Lovely Ladies,” in which Hathaway, as the tubercular, ill-used factory girl Fantine, reaches her final degradation. The layer of mud on the floor and the smell of all those fish lend the proceedings a distinct air of authenticity.
As Hooper, wearing a parka against the air-conditioned chill, looks on, a leering pimp in a top hat and a Felliniesque gaggle of prostitutes, heavily rouged and spilling out of their skimpy dresses (the lovely ladies of the song’s title) descend on Hathaway’s Fantine. “Life has dropped you at the bottom of the heap,” they sing. “Join your sisters, make money in your sleep.” Followed by one of the multiple cameramen filming the scene, Hathaway leads a sailor away by the hand, as she sings in a small, trembling voice, “Come on, Captain, you can wear your shoes. Don’t it make a change to have a girl who can’t refuse?”
Hooper calls, “Cut!” and the lewd, hard-bitten lovely ladies instantly soften into a bunch of fresh-faced chorus girls surrounding Hathaway. “That was a-ma-zing!” one of them says.
“Thank you,” Hathaway whispers in the English accent that she has adopted for the role, before resting on a stool to soak her feet in a bucket. At some point, she spots me and beckons me over. “Aren’t you going to tell me how great I look?” she asks. I stammer for a moment, searching for a compliment, and she smiles wanly. “I’m just teasing,” she says. “Welcome to my world.”
A few months later, Hathaway seems much more in her element at a vegan-friendly restaurant in L.A.’s Silver Lake district, which has recently been named by Forbes magazine as America’s best hipster neighborhood. Hathaway is known for walking the red carpet in Valentino or Stella McCartney, but I can report that she also looks pretty swell in a T-shirt and jeans. Her hair is still short, though the cut now qualifies more as pixie than political prisoner. “I love the short-haired lifestyle,” Hathaway tells me with a laugh (she laughs a lot). “It’s awesome that I was able to go for a hike right before I came here to meet you, quickly wash my hair, and now it’s dry.” The only downside, she says, is having to get her hair cut every three weeks. “But I’m turning 30, and—I hope this isn’t obnoxious to say—I feel prettier, and much more myself. I guess I just feel much more satisfied with less now.”
Less, of course, is a relative term. Hair volume and body-fat percentage aside (she lost 25 pounds to play Fantine and remains very thin, though not unhealthy-looking), Hathaway’s life seems fuller than ever. After her notorious romantic Waterloo with the now-convicted felon Raffaello Follieri, she has found, she says, “true love—the full-on romantic, till-death-do-us-part real deal” with the actor turned jewelry designer Adam Shulman, whom she describes as “a keeper” (more on that later). And after the critical and box-office disappointments of Love and Other Drugs and One Day, she has hit a new professional stride with her commandingly sensual performance as Bruce Wayne’s kitten-with-a-whip love interest Selina Kyle (a.k.a. Catwoman) in The Dark Knight Rises, Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster finale to his Batman trilogy.
Her performance won her critical praise and at least one new fan—that would be Barack Obama—who, after she sang a parody version of Adele’s “Someone Like You” for him at a private fund-raiser in August, declared her “spectacular,” adding, “I got a chance to see Batman, and she was the best thing in it.” Hathaway says, “I’m a blusher, and just being inches from him, I went scarlet from the tips of my toes to the tops of my ears.”
Hathaway was in the middle of shooting The Dark Knight Rises when Les Misérables began casting, and right away, she says, she “really, really wanted this part.” She first saw the musical at age seven, when her mother, who was the understudy for Fantine in a touring production, went on in the role. “I’ll never forget it—I just sat there sobbing,” she recalls. “And I don’t think it was just because I was watching my mother die, though that was definitely part of it. I was just so moved and felt so connected to her and the music and the whole production. I’ve been in love with the show ever since.”
With her charming performance in the 2002 Encores! stage production of the musical Carnival and her duet with Hugh Jackman at the 2009 Oscars, Hathaway had already demonstrated that she knew her way around a show tune. You’d think that she would have been at the top of any shortlist for Les Misérables. But she was told that the producers didn’t want to see her, because she was too young for Fantine and too old for the younger parts. Hathaway insisted, got the audition, and flew to L.A. to meet with Hooper. She had been asked to prepare Fantine’s big number “I Dreamed a Dream,” as well as “Fantine’s Arrest.” (“They wanted to make sure I could hit that E-flat,” she says, going on to demonstrate for me that, in fact, she can.) Hooper, clearly excited, asked her to work with him on Fantine’s death scene, and by the time they were through, three hours had passed.
“It was little short of astonishing—one of the greatest auditions I’ve ever had the privilege to witness,” Hooper recalls. “I’d already had a pretty extraordinary group of female film stars come in. But what was so inspiring about Annie was that I was sitting there still trying to work out, How does one act through song on film? How do you make these songs work in a close-up and get them to tell a story? And Annie provided the answer. It was one of those moments where I relaxed because I thought, Oh, it’s going to work. She gave me reassurance that what I was aiming for in my head was possible.”
Hathaway has a habit of downplaying her own achievements, but not this time. “I knew that someone was going to have to go in there and do something pretty special to unseat me,” she says. “Sometimes you leave a room and you feel like maybe you’ve left the door open a crack. This time, I knew that I had slammed it shut behind me.”
It would be another month before Hathaway learned that she’d gotten the part, but she hit the ground running, reading the original 1,400-page novel (“It’s one of those books, like a Jane Austen, that you feel you need to go back to again and again”), studying the role of women in nineteenth-century French society, and watching documentaries about sexual slavery. She also started working intensely with her voice teacher, the legendary Joan Lader (her clients include Patti LuPone, Sutton Foster, and Madonna, not to mention Jackman), and, she says, “singing all the time because I knew I’d be singing twelve hours a day on set, and I wanted to be ready—not that it takes much to get me singing.”
Hathaway had already gotten in kick-ass shape for her role in The Dark Knight Rises—she became a vegan and spent ten months lifting weights, learning martial arts, and practicing yoga. For her role in Les Mis, she had to look simultaneously emaciated and radiant. Before the start of shooting, she went on a strict cleanse and lost ten pounds, which in the early scenes of the film gives her a gossamer quality. She then took two weeks off and lost another fifteen pounds by following a near-starvation diet, consisting of two thin squares of dried oatmeal paste a day. “I had to be obsessive about it—the idea was to look near death,” she recalls. “Looking back on the whole experience—and I don’t judge it in any way—it was definitely a little nuts. It was definitely a break with reality, but I think that’s who Fantine is anyway.”
Hathaway had several difficult moments to film—getting her hair shorn and her teeth yanked out; singing while being assaulted by a sailor and dying of tuberculosis—but her most daunting challenge was performing “I Dreamed a Dream.” It’s not only one of the show’s most beloved power ballads but an operatic cry of the heart from a woman at the end of the line that, in the wrong hands, could easily descend into kitsch. “A few weeks before we filmed it, I realized how I was going to have to sing it, and that it wasn’t going to be pretty,” Hathaway says. “First of all, it could never have compared with Patti LuPone or Lea Salonga”—both of whom have played Fantine onstage—“or even my mom, really: powerful singers with big, beautiful voices. I knew I couldn’t offer that, but I also knew it wouldn’t be appropriate. If I went for sounding beautiful while looking like this tragic wreck, it would be ridiculous. And I saw an opportunity, because of the nature of film, to just go for it and let it be alive and present and raw.”
An immediate sensation when it was published in 1862, Les Misérables tells the story of Jean Valjean, who, released from prison after nineteen years for stealing a loaf of bread, finds salvation through human kindness (he rescues Fantine from the street, though not in time to save her life) and fatherly love (he raises her daughter, Cosette, as his own) while being pursued across France by the relentless policeman Javert. Starting with an 1897 film by the Lumière brothers, it has been adapted for the screen more than 60 times, including the 1998 Bille August version with Liam Neeson and Geoffrey Rush and the 1979 anime special Jean Valjean Monogatari.
With its dozens of intertwined characters and epic sweep—not to mention its depiction of brutal social injustice and the embattled barricades of the 1832 student uprising—Les Misérables would hardly seem ripe material for a musical. But in 1980 the songwriters Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil produced a French concept album based on the novel. Five years later, under the direction of Trevor Nunn and John Caird (and the auspices of the impresario Cameron Mackintosh), the English version opened in London, where it’s still running. The 1987 Broadway production won a raft of Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and ran for sixteen years. It has since been produced all over the world and committed to heart by generations of dramatically inclined schoolgirls.
I should probably confess that I have never been a big Les Mis fan. When I first saw it on Broadway, it made me squirm in my seat as if someone had dumped a packet of itching powder down my shirt. Nunn and Caird’s staging, with its revolving turntables and almost cinematic fluidity, was (and remains) brilliant. But the score, though infectious to a fault, struck me as bombastic and cloying, and Hugo’s complex story seemed to fly by in a series of blink-and-you-miss-them plot points.
And yet, when I find myself on a plane to London for a private screening of a still-rough cut of the movie that not even its stars have seen, I’m excited because with this cast and this director, how bad could it be?
In fact, it turns out to be a spectacular achievement that, anchored by powerful performances from Jackman as Valjean, Crowe as Javert, and Hathaway as Fantine, reconnects the musical to the novel’s narrative richness and moral vision. Like The King’s Speech, the film is rooted in vivid historical detail, though, thanks to the almost expressionistic production design and Hooper’s eye for symbolism, it inhabits a heightened reality somewhere between period drama and movie musical, where it feels right for escaped convicts, imperious officers of the law, young lovers, and student revolutionaries to sing their feelings. But what makes the film itself revolutionary is Hooper’s choice to have the actors sing live on set rather than lip-synch to recorded playback.
In practical terms, that meant having a pianist on set throughout the entire shoot and fitting the actors with earpieces through which they could hear the accompaniment. (An orchestra would be recorded and mixed in later.)
Because the pianist would follow the actor’s idiosyncratic tempo, it also meant that each take had to be used whole. Hooper’s decision allows the actors to do what they do best—act—and keeps the songs from feeling canned, giving them some of the crackle of a live performance. As Hooper tells me during a chat in his office after the screening, “It was the only way to do it. So much of the illusion of a character or a scene being real comes from harnessing the instability of the present moment.”
I get a chance to see this in action when I visit the soundstage where Jackman, in a brown greatcoat and what looks like a curly-haired wig as Valjean, and Seyfried, in a purple frock and bonnet as Cosette, are shooting part of the ensemble number “One Day More,” Les Mis’s equivalent of “Tonight” from West Side Story. While crew members adjust the lighting, the stars practice snatches of their song (“Tomorrow we’ll be far away/Tomorrow is the judgment day”) and emit a series of Tourette-ish noises—“Maaaah! Mah-mah-mah!”—familiar to anyone who has been backstage at a musical just before curtain time.
Soon, Jackman and Seyfried are seated in an ornately filigreed carriage in which their characters are heading on the “never-ending road to Calvary” toward an uncertain future. Unless you have an earpiece of your own, you hear them singing unaccompanied—Jackman’s tenor is in fine fettle, and Seyfried’s soprano is tremulous and lovely—and the effect is odd. Eventually, the pair will be intercut with the other characters: Javert vowing to pursue Valjean; Redmayne as Cosette’s beloved, Marius, wondering if they will ever be together as he prepares to lead his fellow students in armed insurrection; Samantha Barks as the streetwise Éponine, mourning her unrequited love for Marius; and the two B.C.s—Baron Cohen and Bonham Carter—as the comically treacherous but deadly sinister Monsieur and Madame Thénardier, licking their chops over the potential spoils of revolution. Between takes, Jackman explains why Hooper’s approach works so well. “The freedom it gives you is just amazing,” he says. He goes on to demonstrate, performing the start of his soliloquy “What Have I Done?” three different ways. “That would be a nightmare to lip-synch to later. You might have an entirely different interpretation when you film it months later, but you’re stuck with that one version.”
When I bring up the subject with Hathaway, she says, “You know that you’re going to do five or six takes of a song and then go home and never perform it again. So each day of shooting was like opening night and closing night rolled into one.”
Like Hathaway, all the actors had to audition for their parts—including Jackman, who, as it happens, landed his first professional stage role (Gaston in the Melbourne production of Beauty and the Beast) by auditioning with a song from Les Mis.
As anyone who saw him camp it up on Broadway as Peter Allen in 2003’s The Boy from Oz or tear down the house in his one-man show last year can tell you, there are few—scratch that: There are zero—other performers who combine Jackman’s good looks, charisma, acting talent, and box-office clout with an ability to sing and dance like nobody’s business. Jackman threw himself into landing the part of Valjean. “He’s one of the great literary characters of all time, a real study of the human spirit tested under the worst adversity possible,” Jackman says. “And those parts don’t come along very often.”
Hooper was, in a word, impressed. “I would not have made this film at all if Hugh Jackman did not exist—there was no second choice,” he says. “The power of the man when you’re standing next to him and he’s singing those songs—it just sort of knocks you sideways.” Also knocked sideways by Jackman’s performance was Redmayne, who, as Marius, spent the last day of shooting slung over Valjean’s shoulder, covered in slime, through a mock-up of the Paris sewers. Despite such hardships, Redmayne has long felt a connection to the material. “As soon as the film was announced, everyone in Hollywood started saying, ‘Oh, I love Les Mis,’ ” Redmayne says. “But I swear, I really have loved it since my parents took me to see it when I was seven. I remember being so jealous of the boy playing Gavroche—I wanted to be him so badly, and I think that was the moment I caught the acting bug.” Seyfried was eleven when she saw the show and, like any self-respecting girl her age, memorized the album; she ended up performing one of Cosette’s songs at a recital when she was fifteen. “I sometimes worry that I did it better back then!” she says with a laugh.
Musical-theater fans will recognize a few familiar faces among the movie stars, including Aaron Tveit (Next to Normal) as the young political firebrand Enjolras, Bertie Carvel (Matilda) as Fantine’s tormentor Bamatabois, and, as the Bishop of Digne, who sets Valjean on the path of righteousness, Colm Wilkinson, the stage version’s original Valjean. The big surprise, though, is Samantha Barks, who apparently beat out Taylor Swift and others for the role of the tragically lovelorn Éponine. Barks first came to the attention of producer Cameron Mackintosh when she appeared on the British musical-theater reality series I’d Do Anything, but she had also played Éponine on the West End (opposite Nick Jonas’s Marius), and she understands the character’s iconic power. “When you hear a song like ‘On My Own,’ you immediately relate,” she says. “It’s such a great character to play, because you get so many girls behind you who are like, ‘Come on—fly the flag for the brokenhearted.’ ”
By all accounts the cast, which rehearsed for nine weeks prior to shooting, was unusually close. “Everybody was really pulling for each other on this,” Hathaway recalls. “And I think that came from the fact that we were all doing something so different and so potentially disastrous.” It helped that Crowe threw parties at his apartment on Friday nights. You may not know that Crowe got his start in musical theater (check out his performance of “Hot Patootie—Bless My Soul” from a 1987 Melbourne production of The Rocky Horror Show on YouTube); he has also been the front man for a series of rock bands over the years. For his weekly get-togethers, Crowe made sure that everyone had enough to drink and then gathered them around the piano to perform. Some of the highlights of those nights were Hathaway’s account of “The Man That Got Away,” Seyfried’s rendition of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’s “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us,” and a group version of, yes, Adele’s “Someone Like You.” “Considering how miserable I was on set every day, some of my happiest memories are from those sing-alongs,” Hathaway says. “After that, once we got in front of the cameras, it didn’t feel weird bursting into song around each other.”
On set, Hathaway’s castmates were bowled over from the start by the seamlessness of her transition into Fantine. Seyfried recalls, “As soon as I heard her sing, I was like, ‘Oh, shit. I’ve got to up my game big time.’ ” As Jackman puts it, “After Annie’s first day of rehearsal, I said to Tom, ‘You can just turn the camera on, digitally remove the script from her hands, and she’s going to win the Academy Award.’ ”
Coming off of her intense immersion in Victor Hugo’s France, Hathaway had a hard time readjusting to everyday life. “I was in such a state of deprivation—physical and emotional. When I got home, I couldn’t react to the chaos of the world without being overwhelmed,” she says. “It took me weeks till I felt like myself again. The first time I really threw everything into a part, which was when I did Rachel Getting Married, there was no one waiting for me when I got back. This time, Adam was there. He gets what I do and who I am and supports me in it, and that’s pretty awesome.”
Hathaway and Shulman started dating four years ago, and they got engaged last year. At dinner in L.A., I ask whether they’ve set a wedding date. “We’ve definitely started planning and looking at things,” she tells me. “We’re doing it together—we’re one of those couples—and we’re really looking forward to it, but it’s not going to happen till next year.”
Four days later, I’m at home, MacBook open, looking at aerial photos of Hathaway and Shulman’s wedding, which took place on a bluff overlooking the sea in Big Sur at sunset the evening before. One hundred and fifty guests; tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of flowers; a jazz band; a custom-designed Valentino fairy tale–princess gown. I think to myself, Those kids sure pulled that together fast.
Speaking to me from a hotel in Southeast Asia, where she and Shulman are on their honeymoon a week or so later, Hathaway confesses that her wedding plans had been in the works for some time. “Sorry,” she says with a hint of sheepishness. “I was just really nervous about it getting out.” Apparently it did, but not even the whirring, hovering presence of a helicopter bearing paparazzi above the proceedings could ruin the moment. “Oh, my God, I had a blast. Our friends stayed and partied and danced till really late.”
The wedding dress, as you’ve probably read, was designed by her good friend Valentino, whom she met while shooting The Devil Wears Prada and describes as “family—like some wonderful, non-age-specific sibling.” They didn’t always agree. “I begged him during the first fitting to make the train detachable. He looked at me and said”—she imitates the designer’s distinctively refined Italian accent—“ ‘But it is a dress, not a costume.’ The memory of creating it with him is something that I will treasure forever. He somehow read my mind and designed the dress that I’d always wanted.”
Careerwise, Hathaway seems to be on a roll with big blockbusters—next up is Steven Spielberg’s sci-fi epic Robopocalypse, which is supposed to start shooting in early 2013. But she hasn’t turned her back on the indie world, and she’s started to develop projects of her own to star in and produce. “It’s something that I always knew I wanted to do, but only recently have I felt confident enough,” she says. Her debut as a producer (with Shulman, Marc Platt, and Jonathan Demme) will be Song One, an ensemble drama by the first-time screenwriter and director Kate Barker-Froyland, in which Hathaway will play the sister of a young musician who gets hit by a taxi and goes into a coma. In the meantime, though, she is continuing to tap into her musical-theater roots: As soon as she gets back from her honeymoon, she goes into rehearsal for Perfectly Marvelous: The Songs of Cabaret with Anne Hathaway and Friends, a one-night-only concert at the Public Theater’s Joe’s Pub in New York. (If this is the first you’re hearing of this—sorry, it already happened.)
As Hathaway prepares for the release of Les Misérables this month, she finds herself looking back to the first time she saw her mother play Fantine, more than 20 years ago. She recognizes the irony that her mother’s last role before giving up her life as a professional actor (she dropped out of the Les Mis tour halfway through) was a woman who sacrifices everything for her daughter. “It made me think about how fiercely she loved us,” Hathaway says. “And now, of course, with me having this beyond-my-wildest-dreams success in my own career—and beyond the success, the joy I take just getting to be an actor—knowing what that must have been like for her to put that aside for the good of her children. Oh, my God. I want to be a mother, and I anticipate loving my children quite fiercely. I think about it all the time, though it’s a silly thing to think about because the kind of mother I’ll be depends on the kind of children I have. I can’t wait to meet them.”
For now, she feels as if she’s right where she’s meant to be. “I’d feel a little silly and overly dramatic to say that this feels like destiny,” she says. “But to have this come full circle in such a spectacular way—it’s making me very happy.” She thinks about it for a moment and laughs. “OK, it feels a little like destiny.”
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