“Annie is making salmon bowls for lunch. Do you like the sriracha mayo mixed in or on the side?” Anne Hathaway’s assistant texts as I’m making my way to her office on the Upper West Side. She cooks, too? I think as I arrive to a perfectly prepared meal—salmon, rice, edamame, and avocado, topped with thinly sliced cucumber and a generous dusting of furikake. Hathaway tells me she and her husband make salmon for dinner every Monday, and she looks forward to eating the leftovers for her lunch each Tuesday. “I won’t be offended if you don’t like it, or if you want something else,” she says. But later, when I tell her how delicious it is, she’s visibly relieved. “Even though I said I wouldn’t be offended if you don’t like it,” she says, “I secretly hoped you would.”
As we sit down on her couch to talk, Hathaway is makeup-free, hair in a messy ponytail, wearing a green Guest in Residence sweater for St. Patrick’s Day and jeans. She’s just come from a Pilates workout with her trainer Monique Eastwood. Normally, her office is a calm space where she can focus, but at the moment it’s “a gigantic high-ceiling closet,” she says, stuffed with at least 10 racks of clothes from designers like Loewe and Valentino, approximately 100 pairs of heels, and a pile of hats, belts, and other accessories, most of which are under consideration for The Devil Wears Prada 2 and Mother Mary press tours. She says she’s had fun “playing dress-up” with her stylist Erin Walsh, and shows me all the confirmed looks they’ve selected so far. At one point, Hathaway puts on 10-inch Rick Owens boots that would break most ankles, but she struts around as expertly as a model on a catwalk (perhaps she’s learned a thing or two from filming Prada).
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Dress, Mugler.
These days, Hathaway can’t help but smile when she thinks about where she is in life. Her sons, ages 6 and 10, are “in this really fun zone where we all love hanging out together, which I understand may change,” she says. “Well, we will always love hanging out with them, but their feelings about us might change,” she clarifies, laughing. “So for the moment, we’re all just in it. Adam and I are soaking it up. I’m having the most wonderful time with my family, living in the city of my dreams, and work seems to be going really, really well,” she continues. “So rather obnoxiously, I’m having a great time as everything else burns.”
We bond over the need for joyful distractions amid the general state of the world. “There’s that famous phrase: ‘We need our bread, but we need our roses, too.’ And I would be so sad without them,” Hathaway says. “Life asks so much of everyone to just stay in it. Why would we work so hard if not to experience joy, if not to contribute to beauty or experience beauty? I think you have to learn how to hold all these things simultaneously.”
Despite working in the industry for over half her life, the sparkle hasn’t worn off. “She still has a sense of wonder,” says Michael Showalter, who directed Hathaway in The Idea of You and the Colleen Hoover adaptation Verity, out this fall. “She’s someone who is still excited that we have the opportunity to do this for our careers, and she doesn’t seem to have become jaded in spite of being so famous and being in the public eye and all that comes with it.”
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Bodysuit, Fendi. Earrings, ring, bracelet, Bulgari.
Hathaway maintains that sense of wonder by refusing to take her career for granted. “For example, like working with Chris [Nolan] for the third time, it doesn’t get old,” she says of The Odyssey director, who previously cast her in The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar. “You become even more awed by it, by how rare it is. To get that experience once is so rare. Twice—what a gift. Three times—I don’t even have words for it. And so I’m very aware of how determined I am to be harmonious with it all, because look at this,” she says, gesturing to the room full of fancy clothes. “If I’m not enjoying it, then really, really what’s wrong with me? If I can’t have a positive outlook on it when I’m having such a fortunate ride, then it would be wasted on me.”
“Life asks so much of everyone to just stay in it. Why would we work so hard if not to experience joy, if not to contribute to beauty or experience beauty?”
Perhaps no one is having a busier year than Hathaway. Due to delays, filming, and release schedules, she now has five movies premiering in six months. “It’s crazy to have four years of work coming out in six months,” she says. Spring saw her star in Mother Mary and The Devil Wears Prada 2; this summer, she will lead The Odyssey, along with Matt Damon. She’s also headlining a sci-fi thriller, The End of Oak Street, opposite Ewan McGregor, and Verity. Oh, and she’s developing Yesteryear, an adaptation of the buzzy novel that her production company, Somewhere Pictures, grabbed the rights to; signed on for an untitled “FBI wedding sting comedy” from Your Friends & Neighbors creator Jonathan Tropper; and gearing up to film The Princess Diaries 3.
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Dress, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Necklace, Bulgari.
In A24’s Mother Mary, a psychological drama, Hathaway plays a pop star intent on a comeback who’s sparring with her ex-best friend, a costume designer played by Michaela Coel. In addition to belting an album’s worth of songs by Jack Antonoff, Charli xcx, and FKA twigs, she also had to dance. Early on, she saw footage of herself and thought, “This is really bad…I don’t know that I can ask people to come to see this.” She went home and told her husband she was going to leave the film. But ultimately, she says, “I came to the conclusion that there would be no shame if I was fired, but there would be if I quit.”
She ended up taking dance lessons for months and continued to work on her singing during postproduction, long after the film had wrapped. A year later, when she finally liked what she heard, she returned to the studio with Antonoff to rerecord almost everything, earning his impressed reaction: “He whipped his head at me goes, ‘You have been working.’”
Hathaway’s other recent release, The Devil Wears Prada 2, needs no introduction. When I tell Hathaway I can’t quite get over the fact that her character, Andy Sachs, is working at Runway again, and not, say, at The New York Times, she says: “We thought about that obsessively. I was like, ‘But I threw my phone in the fountain!’ But I think Aline [Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter] nailed it.” Though she can’t resist adding, “We can be many things. Just because you work in a women’s magazine doesn’t mean you’re not a serious person.”
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Bodysuit, Giorgio Armani. Earrings, Bulgari.
The Odyssey was another homecoming of sorts. “I hadn’t been on a set with Chris in 12 years,” she says. “And because I’ve worked so hard in the last dozen years, both as a person and as an actor, I was excited to show him what I’ve been up to.”
Nolan tells me he noticed. “There’s a maturity to her performances now,” he says. “It’s not that something was missing before, it’s just it’s developed, as moving through life develops us all. Her work has a sense of quiet calm to it that’s really remarkable.” And despite her veteran status, he says, Hathaway is always looking to challenge herself. “She’s never satisfied with what she’s done in the past, or what she’s doing in the moment. She’s always striving for something just beyond her grasp.”
In The Odyssey, Hathaway plays Penelope, who spends two decades fending off over 100 suitors while she waits for her husband, Odysseus, to return from war. “We think about Penelope as a model of patience,” she says. “But I was interested in the raw edge of her. I was interested in the fury, the emotion, and the passion that she would have had to ride for him for those 20 years.”
She and Damon, who plays Odysseus, spent a lot of time talking about the bond between their characters. “In a time when so many marriages were made for political convenience, the two of them chose each other, and they understood what they had and that not everybody gets that,” Hathaway says. It helps that she finds herself in such a partnership offscreen. “My whole thing about marriage is…it’s such a big deal to share your life with someone. You know? Because it’s yours. It’s fully yours to do anything you want with,” she says. “And so to find someone who inspires you to say, ‘As great as this is on my own, sharing it with you feels like it could lead to somewhere even better.’ I imagine that actually is rare, and I do feel like I found that and I don’t take it for granted.”
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Bodysuit, C’est Jeanne. Skirt, Tom Ford. Earrings, Bulgari.
Damon tells me he was “blown away” by Hathaway’s performance. He remembers one day on set when they were filming a scene, but the cameras were focused on shooting the background actors 80 to 100 yards away. “Annie was giving it fully, tears rolling down her face. And I was like, ‘Annie, they can’t see you. Save yourself.’ But she had this unending reserve of emotion, and she wanted to make sure every actor she was working with got that full performance,” he says. “I’ve always said when the actor you’re working with is truly great, they’re great enough for both of you, and everything else disappears. All you have to do is look at them, and you just get completely transported. It’s like in their eyes, they’ve created an entire world around you, and it’s just the two of you, and she just carried me.”
“Fear made me harsh with myself. I shudder at the thought that I might have inadvertently been harsh with other people while I was being harsh with myself.”
Hathaway’s generosity as a performer also came up in my conversation with Josh Hartnett, who starred alongside Hathaway and Dakota Johnson in Verity. As someone who stepped away from Hollywood himself in part due to the overwhelm of tabloids and the internet, Hartnett says he “finds her resilience remarkable. I mean, she’s been through some downs in this industry that a lot of people wouldn’t want to endure, and she’s come out on top and in a way that I think she’s fully realized herself as an artist.” She was also generous off-camera: “I have three daughters, and Anne is their favorite actress. They came on set and she was so gracious in giving time with them and made them feel special,” Hartnett says. “A year later they still talk about it.”
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Dress, Mugler. Headpiece, Celia Kritharioti. Earrings, bracelet, Bulgari.
Some of Hathaway’s generosity, as a performer and a person, has come as a result of the self-work she’s done to move beyond the “Hathahate” years and learn how to “trust more deeply and not give way to panic so easily.” But that’s not to say she’s now immune from internet chatter. The night before our interview, she shared a video on her Instagram, showing off the trick her hairstylist uses to give her face a little extra lift (two small braids near each temple that are pulled back and pinned). The trick works so well for her that rumors have swirled in recent months that Hathaway has had a facelift. I tell her it seems like posting the video was a pointed denial.
“I wouldn’t say pointed. But we’re at a time when people feel very confident in assuming what they think is fact, and sometimes what they think is accurate and sometimes it’s not,” she says diplomatically. “My preference would be to never comment on anything and to just live in the mystery and not draw attention to myself, but the speculation has gotten so loud that you do feel the need to just get your truth out there. And I’ll probably always wonder, ‘Should I have posted that or not? Should I have just kept going and done the thing that makes me happy and makes me feel more confident on the red carpet?’ But I felt like the conversation was becoming distracting.
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Dress, Stella McCartney. Earrings, Bulgari.
“Also, by the way, these are huge medical decisions that people are presuming,” she adds. “I wanted to show that like, no, I didn’t make a huge medical decision. It’s just two braids.” She takes me over to the mirror to demonstrate the trick on my hair—and I have to say, my eyes instantly looked a little less tired. “And by the way, the other thing about all this is, I might still get a facelift someday,” she notes.
Had the rumors come earlier in her career, she may not have rolled with the punches so well. “One of the things about younger me is she was really scared, and I think that fear made me harsh with myself,” Hathaway says. “I shudder at the thought that I might have inadvertently been harsh with other people while I was being harsh with myself. I actually get nauseous thinking about it.”
Hathaway says she was a “mess” on the set of The Devil Wears Prada. But thankfully, she was surrounded by “these amazing people who just took care of me, understood I was 22, and made so many things okay,” she says. Filming the sequel gave Hathaway a do-over. “You know how you’ll have certain memories or times in your life that you wish you could revisit because you’re like, ‘God, I wish I could go back there and be the person that I am now and know what I know now.’ That’s what it was like,” she says. “I’ve always felt this enormous debt of gratitude to the movie and how I was protected, especially by [director] David Frankel. So it was exciting to get to go back and say thank you, and show all the work that I’ve done on myself and just aim to be an absolute delight every day.”
NORMAN JEAN ROY
Dress, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello. Necklace, Bulgari.
Learning to be more gentle with herself has made her gentler with others. “To have worked so hard in my life to have…sorry, I do get emotional thinking about it,” she says, her eyes welling with tears, “to have become a more positive person, to have become a healthier person, to have become a safer person, I was really happy that I could share that with people who were so formative and responsible for so many of the beautiful things that I have in my life.”
When I ask her if she still worries it will all disappear tomorrow, she admits that she does. “But what I do feel secure in is how I would hold it if it were to all disappear tomorrow. If nothing big ever happens to me ever again, I’ve still had more than most. And the truth is that, of course, I want to keep pushing myself. Of course, I want to keep doing this. I want to see what I’m like as an actor when I’m in my 50s and 60s and 70s and 80s, which doesn’t seem so far off now. But if that’s not in the cards for me, I certainly can keep my head held high and be very proud and very grateful for all the generosity that’s been shown to me.”
Lead Image: Dress, Stella McCartney. Earrings, Bulgari.
Hair by Orlando Pita at Orlo Salon; makeup by Fulvia Farolfi at MA+ Group; manicure by Deborah Lippmann for Deborah Lippmann; set design by Marla Weinhoff at 11th House Agency; produced by Alexey Galetskiy Productions.
A version of this story appears in the Summer 2026 issue of ELLE.
GET THE LATEST ISSUE OF ELLE