“She was a good friend to me”: the character Anne Hathaway couldn’t shake
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Great unlikeable roles for women are still rare and risky prospects in film. With societal pressures remaining focused on women being warm and accommodating, female characters who aren’t loveable protagonists or venomous villains still feel like a hard sell. When Anne Hathaway, who made her name playing fictitious princesses and fairy tale heroines, made the shift from teen to adult roles in the mid-2000s, there was one far-from-wholesome character who helped her reinvent herself.
After starring in the Princess Diaries sequel in 2004, as well as Ella Enchanted, Hathway was eager to “grow up [with her] audience” rather than be trapped in arrested development. This led to a bumpy transition phase. She went full-tilt into 2005’s Havoc, which required nude scenes and was so poorly reviewed it didn’t get a US release, then the far better received Brokeback Mountain, which helped define the kinds of films she wanted to be part of.
2006’s The Devil Wears Prada and Becoming Jane the following year continued to propel Hathaway’s stardom but returned her to safer, sympathetic characters in lighter entertainment. 2008’s Rachel Getting Married finally gave the actor her meatiest role so far, playing Kym Buchman, a woman recovering from drug abuse in rehab who is invited to her older sister’s wedding.
Being made to feel like the family outcast again, Kym’s behaviour quickly descends into a self-destructive spiral, reopening old wounds and creating new ones as buried truths and exposed lies threaten to ruin her sister’s big day. It’s the sort of role most actors relish, the kind of ‘warts and all’ performance Hathaway needed to give at the time to truly dismantle the squeaky-clean perception of her.
It certainly worked: amid the overwhelmingly positive critical reception, Hathaway was consistently singled out for her rawness in an almost irredeemably self-centred part that was nonetheless vulnerable and tragically authentic. Speaking to The Telegraph, Hathaway described an instant emotional connection to the script: “I somehow wound up on the floor sobbing by the last page.” Three years after Rachel Getting Married was released, she told The Guardian that this connection had been hard to disentangle from, though the experience of embodying someone with such deep-rooted problems was ultimately a positive one.
“I didn’t shake Kym for a really long time. It sounds odd, but she was a good friend to me,” the actor admitted. “Although in many ways she was trapped by her illness, she was also incredibly free and playing her allowed me to get in touch with that aspect of myself.”
Hathaway’s performance earned her Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Actress’, eventually winning the latter accolade in the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ category for a similarly tortured, musical role as terminally ill French sex worker Fantine in the big screen adaptation of Les Misérables. Even after proving herself someone capable of portraying characters of real grit and darkness, Hathaway has never quite shaken her ‘good girl’ public image, which some media outlets and social media commenters claim to be irritating at times.
Hathaway has returned to playing disturbed women in recent years, like in 2023’s Eileen and She Came To Me, roles she seems comfortably confident in. At the same time, she continues to honour her rom-com roots in 2024’s The Idea Of You, making it clear the versatility she’s built a successful career on will always be divorced from the woman she’s perceived to be off-screen.
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