The performance that redefined Anne Hathaway’s career: “That experience, it was pivotal”
In May 2022, a low-budget film aired at the Cannes Film Festival to little fanfare. A semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama set in 1980s Queens, the film followed Paul Graff, a young and impressionable Jewish-American boy navigating adolescence, race and family expectations during the Reagan era.
Armageddon Time was written and directed by James Gray, of 2007’s We Own the Night, 2013’s The Immigrant, and 2019’s Ad Astra fame, and is a deeply personal story, reflecting the director’s own upbringing in the New York neighbourhood of Flushing as a young boy of Russian-Jewish descent.
The film’s critical reception was mixed, but it received favourable reviews from the public, with many praising the performance of Anne Hathaway, who starred in the role of Esther Graff, Paul’s mother, transforming into a restrained and empathetic portrait of a woman struggling with her prejudices and familial expectations, making for a quietly powerful and nuanced performance. The actor starred alongside Jeremy Strong and Anthony Hopkins, who also received critical appraisal alongside their adolescent co-stars, Banks Repeta and Jaylin Webb.
It was this performance that changed the trajectory of Anne Hathaway’s acting career. Speaking to Vogue ahead of the release of A24’s Mother Mary, in which she plays a pop star going through an existential crisis, written and directed by David Lowery, of The Green Knight acclaim, she got candid about her evolving relationship with acting, even after years in the game.
“When I worked with James Gray on Armageddon Time, he’d say, ‘Don’t ever try to nail it’,” she recalled. Known for her immersive personal preparation and acting style defined by a million-dollar smile and classical technique, Hathaway has cemented her craft through following a well-trodden script, so deviating from this can’t have come naturally. But the actor was forced to bin her notes and allow the performance to shape itself in real time, ultimately leading to a stand-out display.
“When you impose your shape on a performance, when there’s that scaffolding, it’s less risky,” she continued, adding, “But what James wanted was a degree of transparency. And that experience—it was pivotal.”
For her role as Esther, Hathaway clearly moved away from some of her flashier characters, like in The Devil Wears Prada, Les Misérables, and Interstellar. Since its release, the now 42-year-old actor has evolved her filmography, recently starring in a clutch of gritty psychological dramas, including as a 1960s psychologically vulnerable housewife alongside Jessica Chastain in Mother’s Instinct and a glamorous and enigmatic prison psychologist in Eileen, and bringing radical sexual liberation as a single mother in the rom-com The Idea of You.
If A24 has anything to do with it, Mother Mary looks set to be even more experimental, with songs by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX and a supporting cast that includes FKA Twigs, Hunter Schafer, and Kaia Gerber. Looks like she’s putting her experience and charm to good use for some truly stellar onscreen performances, and garnering acclaim as a generational star.
