“I feel like I’ve gone too far”: Anne Hathaway Makes a Confession About Her Iconic Role in Eileen

Anne Hathaway has done many stellar roles, but her portrayal of Rebecca in Eileen is one of the few performances that would go down in history. This intense psychological thriller directed by William Oldroyd has been described as “wildly audacious, wondrously twisted,” and “deliciously deranged” by Variety. Benjamin Lee of The Guardian even found Hathaway’s performance in the movie to be “pitch-perfect.”

However, recently, in an interview, Anne Hathaway opened up about her iconic role in Eileen and her perception of her performance is quite different from that of critics. While the viewers could not get enough of her, she actually thought that she went too far in portraying her role to perfection.

Anne Hathaway was worried that she had gone “too far” with Eileen

Although the Ottessa Moshfegh-penned film made Hathaway feel much “braver” as an actor, she still has reservations about her performance in Eileen. This year in Variety’s Actor on Actor, the actors chose to be vulnerable and share the fears they had to overcome to deliver a great performance. When it came to Anne Hathaway, she opened up by saying that it was changing her signature brunette locks and sporting a fake accent for one of her most acclaimed movies, Eileen. 

Hathaway said that she remembered telling her friend, “I think I’ve gone too far this time.” She found it a nerve-wracking ordeal and said:

“Oh God, I’m blond and I invented an accent. I’m not basing it on anyone except for my own imagination. This is the way I saw her, and I feel like I’ve gone too far.”

Also Read: Anne Hathaway Cried Herself out of a Date After Wanting to Badly Escape it

However, despite Anne Hathaway being paranoid about her performance, her vision translated spectacularly on-screen. Even Emily Blunt, who was taking the interview, touted her performance by saying she was looking “so sexy in this movie… it’s crazy.” She also hyped her up by admiring a scene where Hathaway’s character opens a bottle of wine with a shoe. 

Hathaway also mentioned that she would not have been able to pull off such a character on-screen had it not been for the endless support of William Oldroyd, the director of the film. She characterized him as “a giggle of a person” who is “delighted by darkness.” He would apparently make the time go by fast and would also help make shooting such an intense movie much more bearable. 

“We would have so many complicated scenes to do, and somehow he would dilate time around us. I would come out of scenes in a blackout thinking that we’d been filming for seven hours, and it had been 50 minutes. I had to trust him so much because I was stepping so far outside my comfort zone.”

Also Reading: “I don’t know if I would have been considered”: Anne Hathaway Believes Christopher Nolan Might Not Have Wanted Her as Catwoman Over Her ‘Confirmed’ Marvel Casting

It seems worth it in the end, given how thoroughly praised Hathaway’s performance was for the movie. She broke away from her usual character to embrace a much more twisted and dark persona that is quite different from what the audience usually associates with her. The movie has been deservedly crowned the “career-best” performance of the leads by IndieWire.

Anne Hathaway is glad that her Barbie movie never got made

In 2017, Anne Hathaway was announced as the star of Sony’s Barbie film after Amy Schumer dropped out of the project. The movie, sadly, never materialized. However, it gave Margot Robbie and her production company, Lucky Chap, the opportunity to swoop in and convince Warner Bros. to take on the movie under Greta Gerwig’s direction, starring Robbie herself.

In a recent interview with the Happy Sad Confused podcast, she showered nothing but praise on the movie. She called the movie a “bullseye” and the right version of Barbie and said it was a “lucky thing” that the Sony movie did not develop.

“The thing that’s so exciting about what Margot and Greta and Ryan and America and that entire phenomenal team [did] is they hit a bullseye. The bullseye caused the entire world to reach this level of ecstasy. Now imagine that version—that much energy, that much anticipation, that much emotion—but it’s not the right version. So I actually think of it as a lucky thing [the Sony movie didn’t get developed].”

Also Read: “She’s occupied in another universe”: Anne Hathaway was Grateful Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 Never got Made Because of Christopher Nolan

She even expressed her admiration for Margot Robbie in the same interview by calling her performance “sublime.”

“Margot is just sublime, period. What she is doing as a creative person and a producer is so exciting and inspiring. And the mythic giants they toppled with [Barbie] that have kept certain narratives in place that have not allowed opportunities to develop for so many people, they ran straight through it, dancing, sparkling!”

She dove deeper into how the movie was far better than what Sony was trying to produce and helmed it as the best possible version of Barbie.

“Just as a cinema-goer and just as a woman in Hollywood since I was a kid, I’m thrilled by the development. If I believed that the version I was attached to could have done that, yeah, I might feel differently about it, but I genuinely think their [film] was the best possible version. So it’s actually very easy to just be thrilled and happy [for them]. I’m also a person who loves watching women kill it. I just do, I just love it. And also, to do so well, so undeniably that they actually had to write new records, come on! … I think it’s probably going to make things better.”

Barbie was one of the biggest blockbusters in Hollywood this year and went on to overshadow even Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie, and many of the characters became pop culture phenomena. It is the biggest hit of Greta Gerwig’s career so far and many even put it up there as one of the best films of her career.

Eileen is available to watch on Prime Video.