ANNE HATHAWAY COVERS THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE OF ALLURE MAGAZINE.{PHOTOS}.

      According to the magazine ''At the top of June, I woke up to rain on my window and two unread emails. The first message was from an older friend passing along a quote from the author Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love; City of Girls) on the differences between people she called “Jackhammers” and those she called “Hummingbirds.” According to Gilbert, Jackhammer People and Hummingbird People are distinct in how they deal with the work they want or feel they are meant to do, but neither approach is more useful or more desirable than the other. She defends the poor Hummingbirds who “bring an idea from here to over there, where you learn something else and you weave it in.” They are undervalued connectors and innovators who change what we believe is possible, she says, insisting that this perspective “ends up keeping the entire culture aerated.” However, when Jackhammers like Gilbert find their meaningful goal or work, “we don’t look up, we don’t veer, and we’re just focused on that until the end of time.” She writes, “It’s efficient; you get a lot done.”.The next email asked if I was available to interview Anne Hathaway. There would be a movie of hers to see, The Last Thing He Wanted, a Netflix original film adapted from the book of the same name by Joan Didion. Despite being deep enough in my own book-writing process to finally begin using the word no liberally, I wanted the assignment. I feel pop-culturally tied to Anne Hathaway by age and interest, and I find the trajectory of her career fascinating. Anne Hathaway is a Jackhammer.I’m part of the generation of 30-​something women who were teenagers when Hathaway showed up in The Princess Diaries and Ella Enchanted. I was graduating from high school when we got to see her in Brokeback Mountain, and I kind of melted for her when my young fashion-design-major heart saw her fringe bangs and impossible outfits in The Devil Wears Prada. Rachel Getting Married coincided with my first bout of Big Girl Depression and my sixth change of college major.When I crawled my way out of the fog of mental illness, I danced around a living room with two little boys I babysat while their parents worked real full-time jobs, and we sang every song from Rio at the top of our lungs. It was near impossible to miss the backlash after Les Misérables, but the peanut gallery called her charming again by the time The Intern came out, and her performance in Ocean’s 8 was often referred to as a full-scale comeback. In May, she received her star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. She also got married and had a baby somewhere in there.I responded to the first email thanking my friend for thinking of me, assuring them I would attempt to think of my fluttering interests, pursuits, and projects as being in service to a more complex creative life. Then I looked at my calendar and responded to the second email saying I wanted to do the interview.The blazer I wore for the interview was a mistake. It was my favorite — fun and comfortable. But on the deceptively humid, overcast day I’d walked into, it created a clammy barrier between my sweat-soaked skin and the weak, recycled air of the subway train. The bodysuit I wore under it was modest enough paired with the blazer, but without it, positively scandalous. I smiled apologetically at almost every person I encountered for my damp appearance. When I walked up to our meeting place, the doorman asked if I needed to sit down. I assured him I was fine and waved to a tinted window just in case she was behind it. Anne Hathaway slid from the backseat of the black SUV outside the building where we’d come to learn to make sushi. She was dressed in blue jeans and a black shirt, with a long-sleeve flannel tied around her waist. She hugged me and I apologized.As we walked toward the elevator, I asked how she was feeling today, a quick mood check. Hathaway turned to me with that even-brighter-than-you-think smile, tilted her head a bit, and answered, “Honestly, I don’t know yet.” She explained that she’d gotten up, rushed around, and hadn’t really had a moment to check her own temperature. Then she asked if I’m good at small talk. I told her some version of not really. “Good,” she said, smiling again. “Me neither.” I thought this must have been intended to make me feel better because she’s won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for her ability to perform. Not that this moment felt like a performance; it didn’t. She was kind and warm and I think genuinely excited to learn how to make sushi. She said she’d wanted to do this for a long time. “Ordering sushi, all the containers, napkins…” She waved her hands around to represent the mass of…stuff that inevitably arrives with your takeout. “It would just be less expensive and less wasteful for me to do it at home.” Hathaway supports many eco- and environmentally friendly initiatives in the United States and around the world. “I’ve been very lucky in life, and I just see this as my responsibility as a person with the time and means to do it.”.We greeted our cooking instructor and host before removing our shoes and bags. She told us where to find aprons, and with the longer collar of Hathaway’s black shirt, the lace detail at the neck of the apron made her look like she’d gone back in time and taken us all with her. I noticed the gentle, instrumental music in the room and asked Hathaway if she grew up in a musical household. She did. But not the coolest music for her age group. Her family listened to a lot of musicals, though her vocalist mother, who had also played the role of Fantine, would often listen to singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Aretha Franklin as well. This bit of cultural distance in music wasn’t the biggest deal to the kids at school, but then, of course, there was the singing. “My family sang constantly,” Hathaway said, laughing at the memory. “I didn’t know that wasn’t normal until the seventh grade. One day a friend just sat me down and said, ‘I need to talk to you about the singing.’ ” Hathaway was embarrassed but, in all the most important ways, undeterred. She may have stopped constantly singing in the hallways of her school, but she did not stop singing. She sings (and dances) in an episode of the series Modern Love, to be released this fall from Amazon Studios. “I think there is no better way to express joy in a performance,” she says. “Singing and dancing forces you to open yourself up to vulnerability.” Then she adds, “I don’t think anyone is expecting me to win a Grammy or anything, so I just kept my expectations realistic and did my best.”.I asked if she grew up in a home where if she wanted to do something she could reasonably expect to be free to make it happen. “No. And yet [my parents] 100 percent believed in me. They just wanted me to be happy.” Hathaway’s parents made room for her interest in performance and were supportive of her budding career, “but I had to take the lead.” While spreading sticky rice on the rough side of good seaweed and learning to roll (not too fast, not too hard), she explained that she’d looked for her own auditions and her own opportunities, and her parents mostly gave her love, encouragement, and a lot of car rides from New Jersey to New York.I can’t imagine anyone would be surprised to know Anne Hathaway has been in the driver’s seat of her own career. She consistently chooses roles with strong, smart, and unusually tenacious women who are looking for something, proving something, learning something, or simply refusing to give up. Neither she nor they seem to want to run from a fight, but Hathaway has learned a better way. “I used to love to fight!” she said. “It felt so good to fight and be right.” As anyone in a healthy relationship knows, an insistence on being right won’t last long in matters of love. Hathaway resisted. “You have those moments where you just want to grab them, like, Noooooo! I just want to be petty for a little bit longer.”

After we finished learning to make sushi with rice outside, sushi with rice inside, and hand-rolled sushi, we moved toward a table set for two beside a massive window overlooking a sparkling East River. Hathaway was very pleased with her handmade sushi, and I admitted I was also pleased with mine. She said we should take pictures, and I agreed, but I was using my phone to record our conversation. “But we need proof!” She leaned over the bench at our side and rifled through her bag to find her camera. Once she had it in her hand, she lifted it above her head triumphantly and said, “I’m going to prove this!”.Hathaway quickly takes photographic evidence of our shared superior sushi-making skills, and I move on to the film that brought us here together. If costarring with Rebel Wilson in The Hustle was an opportunity to show her comedy chops, Dee Rees’s The Last Thing He Wanted was an opportunity to do something similar in the way of political thriller and suspense. Elena McMahon, the character Hathaway plays, is an investigative journalist with that signature tenacity, though the drive had become warped over time. In some ways, she is exactly what Hathaway wants to avoid becoming. “I feel like something about working on The Last Thing He Wanted made my character so angry and so righteous. She’s not wrong for the reason she’s angry, but [it’s] taken over her life. Now she’s more angry than alive.”

Elena McMahon is a woman both obviously in pain and increasingly numb. How did playing her affect Hathaway in her real, everyday life? “It had a big impact on me because anger is something that’s been a big part of my journey. Not necessarily neutralizing it, because anger is useful, but learning the whys of it. Learning how to ask, How does this serve me?”.As we finished the meal and were treated to a gorgeous dessert of sweet berries and creamy mochi, Hathaway and I continued to chat about life on the set of The Last Thing He Wanted. One of the ways Rees requested she prepare to play Elena was by gaining 20 pounds. Though Hathaway happily agreed, her early experiences with conversations around roles and weight lingered. “At 16 years old, it was ‘Congratulations, you have the part. I’m not saying you need to lose weight. I’m just saying don’t gain weight.’ Which of course means you need to lose weight.” She continued, “So I had that, then 20 years later I have Ane Crabtree [costume designer for The Last Thing He Wanted] asking me what my body does on my moon — which I realized meant my period — so she can make adjustments for me. It was just this beautiful thing. I am cautious in my praise of how Hollywood is shifting. There is so much more body inclusivity — which is great! — but the thin thing is definitely still the centralized ‘normal’ expectation.”.Hathaway told me that at no point had she really considered giving up on performance. In fact, she sees brighter days ahead for women in the industry. “It’s more nuanced, and it’s more interesting. It’s allowed for more interesting characters and stories. Now the big question is are audiences appreciating it? If it’s not supported, it won’t continue. It will go back to the way it was, and people will say, ‘Okay, that didn’t work.’ ”

While we all wait to see what happens in the long run, Hathaway is preparing for a role in the new Sesame Streetmovie and working on producing projects she can’t share just yet. She’ll also give birth to a baby in the fall, something I suspected from the first hug but wanted her to confirm. It’s an announcement meant for her to control. And of course, that’s the only way she would have it.

Allure, September Issue⁣⁣
🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤🖤⁣⁣

Photographed by Sølve Sundsbø⁣⁣
Styled by George Cortina
Hair by Jenny Cho
Makeup by Diane Kendal⁣⁣
Manicure by Rieko Okusa
Story by Ashley C. Ford- Anne Hathaway wrote on social media.More photos below.