Back in 2007, Anne Hathaway was operating in a pretty narrow lane, much of it defined by the word “Princess.” Sure, she’d dipped into more serious stuff with Brokeback Mountain, and had already starred in The Devil Wears Prada by that point, but all of that could be understood as being of a piece—one that did not involve being cinematically depicted getting wasted and banging Seth Rogen, or having the visuals of a baby’s head poking its way out of a vagina attached to her pristine image.
That, at least, is per Rogen himself, who opened up (per Variety) in a recent interview about Hathaway dropping out of Judd Apatow’s 2007 comedy Knocked Up. Talking to Olivia Wilde (who also auditioned for the role) for A24, Rogen diplomatically confirmed a story Apatow told back at the time, that Hathaway quit the movie in part because she didn’t want to be attached to footage of an actual baby’s head crowning during a real birth during the film’s climactic moments. “Crowning is a tough one,” Rogen noted of Hathaway’s unhappiness. “She didn’t want the crowning of the baby to be visually representative. Even though it wasn’t going to be hers… It’s obviously not real. But she didn’t even want…she felt that it was not her brand.”
Rogen makes it pretty clear, though, that he thinks this one issue was used as a stand-in for Hathaway’s general unhappiness with the part. “Part of me also… We had started rehearsing the movie… Maybe she was just like, ‘I don’t know if this is for me.’ I don’t know. I will take what she said at face value, which was the crowning. She had a sense, and she knew it was not for her.” Which Rogen doesn’t try to argue against, noting that “She has been right about a lot more things than I have over the years. So I think she was probably right.” (He was also quick to praise Katherine Heigl, who took on the abandoned part, saying, “And then Heigl was great. Katie Heigl was great.”)