Anne Hathaway discusses the creepy question she was asked by a journalist as a child
When the period psychological thriller Eileen recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the performances of Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie were widely applauded. With the former playing a glamorous counsellor and the latter a prison secretary who is drawn to her new counterpart in a potentially dangerous game, Hathaway revealed that 1960s-set film struck a personal chord.
During a post-screening Q&A, Hathaway revealed that this was because of a creepy question she was asked by a journalist when she was 16 years old. “I just remembered one of the very first questions I ever got asked when I started acting and had to do press was: Are you a good girl or a bad girl?” the actor explained. “I was 16. And my 16-year-old self wanted to respond with this film.”
The Devil Wears Prada star also said that her decision to sign up for the role of Dr. Rebecca St. John in Eileen was fuelled by her love of director William Oldroyd’s 2016 drama Lady Macbeth. Based on the novella Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District by Nikolai Leskov, it starred Florence Pugh as a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage to a bitter older male.
“I thought it was an extraordinary work,” Hathaway said. “I saw a study of female complication that hit me really, really deep, and I felt like Will was a filmmaker that could be trusted to tell complicated stories, especially about females.”
“I love my accent,” New Zealander McKenzie expressed elsewhere. “I’m a very very proud New Zealander, but I find it pretty distracting myself.”
Whether it be in the new film or Edgar Wright’s hit 2021 film Last Night in Soho – where she was praised for the accuracy of her English accent – McKenzie explained that she speaks in the voice of her character for the entirety of a shoot.
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