Anne Hathaway’s awkward first meeting with Christopher Nolan: “Shifting into a different gear, right now!”
Some movies take several decades to be critically reappraised; perhaps people just didn’t quite get them the first time around, or the world simply moved on, and they were proven to be ahead of their time. But one film that experienced it very quickly is Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, starring Anne Hathaway.
When it was released just over a decade ago, it was seen by critics as a deeply impressive piece of work, but by no means a masterpiece. It was variously described as clunky, sentimental and overly ambitious, and although it made a vast amount of money at the box office, it wasn’t a film that you were hearing people say had to be seen.
But then, around five years ago, something interesting happened. Thanks to a perfect storm of social media memes, a renewed appreciation of Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack, a collective human experience due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the literal space to understand what Nolan was trying to achieve with Interstellar, it started to become appreciated as possibly his masterpiece, outdoing even the mighty, multi-Oscar-winning epic Oppenheimer from 2023.
To rewatch it 12 years after its release in 2014, on the biggest screen you can find, is an awe-inspiring experience. It is an even better film than you remember, and at the heart of it are two superb performances from Matthew McConaughey and Hathaway, who should really have received an Academy nomination to go with her two for Rachel Getting Married and Les Misérables, the latter of which she won.
Because she leaves absolutely nothing behind on Interstellar, completely buying into Nolan’s vision and providing a full gamut of emotions as the NASA scientist Dr Brand. Nolan is a director who trusts the same actors again and again once they are in his inner circle, and his coupling with Hathaway on the film represented a second outing after she first worked under him two years beforehand on the third film in his Batman series, The Dark Knight Rises.
Released in 2012, four years after Heath Ledger stunned the world with his Oscar-winning turn as the Joker in the second movie, the movie provided Hathaway’s first meeting with Nolan, on an audition that initially went far from smoothly, with the actor believing she would be going for the part of Harley Quinn, the Joker’s girlfriend, only to quickly discover that was not the case, and that Quinn wasn’t even a character in the movie.
She told Radio One: “That was the initial meeting with Chris. I came in, and I had this lovely Vivienne Westwood, you know, beautiful but kind-of-mad tailoring top with stripes going everywhere, and I wore these flat kind of Joker-y looking shoes, and I was just kind of trying to give Chris these crazy little smiles.”
The reason for Quinn’s omission appears to be that she was simply too much of a quirky, comic book persona for Nolan’s darker, more real-world tone, and she next popped up played by Margot Robbie in 2016’s Suicide Squad.
Hathaway, though was signed up by Nolan to go up against the Batman as his feline nemesis, with the actor adding: “About an hour into the meeting, he goes, ‘Well I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this, but it’s Catwoman.’ And I was like, ‘Shifting into a different gear, right now! We’re slinking, I’m more slinky, I hate my shirt, I love my shirt but not right now, we’re slinky.”
Hathaway nevertheless does a fine job as Selina Kyle and Catwoman in the 2012 movie that, rather like Interstellar, has seen its stock rise in terms of critical appraisal in the years since its release. Grossing over $1bn at the box office, it also featured an award-winning score by Hans Zimmer and initially suffered due to the high bar set by The Dark Knight in 2008. She will next be seen in her third Nolan film, the highly anticipated The Odyssey with Matt Damon, due out on July 17th.
