Anne Hathaway Enters Her ‘Queen Era,’ Reprising Iconic Roles and Cementing Her Reign in Fashion

Photoshoots used to terrify Anne Hathaway. 

“I was always so scared about how I was going to fail,” she says. 

It’s a strange thing to hear the Oscar winner admit, seeing how she’s covered every major fashion magazine, is the face of brands like Versace and Bulgari and, oh yeah, is a bonafide A-list movie star. “Failing” in general isn’t a word often associated with her.

But that’s what’s fun about being let inside Anne Hathaway’s world: She’s keen to peel back the layers.

“I’m someone who’s slow to open — I’m getting much, much, much better at it. But fashion to me is a business made on creativity and intimate relationships,” she says. “I think when I was looking at it more from the outside, I didn’t understand that the business people are also creative and that the creative people are also business-oriented and that they really do take care of each other. And so that’s the part that I think I didn’t understand, is the level of care and passion and authenticity. Genuine humanity exists within fashion. I appreciate that so much more now, partially because I know so many more people in it. When I arrived at that place in a more meaningful way in my life, that was when it opened up for me in terms of a tangible relationship in fashion.”

Playing the Part

Hathaway, who turned 42 in November, broke out in “The Princess Diaries” in 2001, but her foray into the fashion world truly exploded with the 2006 movie “The Devil Wears Prada.” Suddenly she was associated with runway shows, fashion magazines and brands her character Andy wore like Chanel and Fendi. 

The movie’s costume designer, Patricia Field, says even back then Hathaway had the makings of the fashion star she is today. 

“She understood [fashion] and she liked it, and that’s the best type of a person that I could deal with, in my mind,” Field says. “Positive, knowledgeable, and eager.”

The last several years have seen the Oscar winner find her place in the fashion scape, with a playful yet emotionally led approach to dressing that is the handiwork of her partnership with stylist Erin Walsh. They began working together in 2019; at the time, Hathaway and her husband, Adam Shulman, were expecting their son, Jack, and soon after she gave birth Walsh became pregnant with her son, Hugo. 

“We just kind of went real deep, real fast, and now she’s my sister,” Hathaway says. 

Their work together has resulted in Hathaway’s elevation to style icon. Her red carpet looks, be it a custom ivory tweed Versace gown at the 2023 Met Gala or a white cotton Gap shirtdress worn in Rome earlier this year, become instant fodder for fashion media. She’s also landed major campaigns along the way: In 2022 she became the face of Bulgari in 2022, and last year, Versace. 

The Versace Woman

“It’s something I’m very proud of for a lot of different reasons. I am very excited to work for a company that wants to have 40-year-old woman as their face. And by the way, 40 years old does not have to be the ceiling. I love to work with people who love you back, and it’s amazing to be seen by people who are looking for someone like you,” she says of her work with Versace.

“One thing that I love about Annie is she has this thing where I think she’s learned how to be completely vulnerable and transparent and authentic about who she is,” Walsh says. “If you look at a Versace woman, always very powerful. That works for Annie because not only is she not afraid to be completely raw, completely real, but with anything she does, she does 600 percent. With these kinds of campaigns, it’s about being both. It’s the dichotomy of being brave and vulnerable enough to share your real self and all of that person, and I think that’s why it works.”

Hathaway, who was born in Brooklyn but grew up in New Jersey, describes herself as a late bloomer, which makes her all the more suited to leading such brands at this moment in her career. 

“I think there is a warmth to the Versace woman that I was afraid of when I was in my 20s. There is a give-and-take and a playfulness and a self-respect, and to respect yourself enough that you can really actually pay attention to everyone else. That is a key quality to being a Versace woman. And I wasn’t there yet in my 20s,” she admits. “I just didn’t have any confidence. And I think that there’s been so much growth. There’s been so much character development that’s happened since then for me in all aspects of my life. And so I think that it’s meant that I couldn’t have been a fit for Versace before. I might have been able to look the part, but it wouldn’t have gone as deep.”

Donatella Versace describes it as an “honor” to work with Hathaway. 

“Anne is now part of the Versace family. She is a true icon and I love the way she has made Versace her own,” Versace writes. “I love collaborating with her and learn so much from her and how she wears our clothes.”

It’s easy to see why such designers would want to attach themselves to Hathaway at this moment in her career. She’s never been more in-demand, and has shown over the almost 25 years she’s been acting that she really can do it all. 

Reprising Roles

This year it was revealed that Hathaway would be returning to two of her most beloved characters. Her breakthrough role as Mia Thermopolis in “The Princess Diaries” movies, released in 2001 and 2004, will be revitalized in a third movie. And the film that cemented Hathaway into the fashion world, “The Devil Wears Prada,” will also be getting a reboot, with a planned sequel unveiled last July. 

“I was so beautifully cared for on both of those films,” Hathaway says. “I was a baby, like a legal child, when I made ‘Princess Diaries’ — I turned 18 while we were making it, and I was a very, very young woman when I made ‘Devil Wears Prada.’ I was so guided and looked after and cared for by the communities that made both of those films in particular, each of their directors, Garry Marshall and David Frankel. I’m so excited that now I can do that for other people, that now I have the knowledge and the experience and the confidence to take care of other people on sets in which I’m looked at as a leader.” 

It might be expected that having become a world-famous actress with an Oscar and her own production company as well that Hathaway wouldn’t be that keen to dive back into previous roles. But she’s big on long-term relationships: she’s had the same manager since she was 16, the same agents since her early 20s, the same lawyers and publicists for nearly as long. 

“I’m a Scorpio — I really identify as a Scorpio and Scorpios are so big on loyalty,” she says. “Even though I’m still — I don’t even know how to describe what my age is — but even though I still feel youthful, I can say with some degree of certainty and confidence that I think you’ve got to season the pan and things get really, really tasty after 20 years. And so to imagine the art and the storytelling that can be born from that place, that makes me really excited.”

“I’ve been an admirer of Anne’s for years, not just her movies, her range and her appetite for risk, but also how she’s handled herself and grown up in an industry that’s fickle and tumultuous, while always maintaining her core authenticity and grace,” says Adele Lim, the screenwriter of “Crazy Rich Asians” who will direct the new “Princess Diaries” film. “There are countless teen princesses, but Anne is unquestionably in her queen era.” 

Hathaway remains tight-lipped about any specifics of either film — “I cannot tell you a thing!” — but if fans have any sway the productions will be underway as soon as possible. And that works for her: Until July, she’d worked back-to-back for four straight years, and her list of upcoming films is endless. Up next is “Mother Mary,” in which she plays a famous musician opposite Michaela Coel and Hunter Schafer; “Flowervale Street,” a science fiction film with Ewan McGregor and Maisy Stella; an adaptation of Caro Claire Burke’s novel “Yesteryear,” which she’ll also produce; and James Gray’s “Paper Tiger,” costarring Adam Driver and Jeremy Strong, among others. 

In the Driver’s Seat

In other words, it’s clear that Hathaway still has a lot she wants to accomplish. 

“It’s such an unusual job that you sign up for, and I’ve never felt like I’ve — perhaps some people who only make billion-grossing movies can feel this way, but if you love independent cinema as much as I do, you’re always grateful for the jobs that keep the lights on and being able to go back and forth between the two of them,” she says.

In November, it was revealed that she is joining Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film, alongside Zendaya, Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Charlize Theron, Robert Pattinson and Lupita Nyong’o. Hathaway first worked with Nolan in “The Dark Knight Rises” in 2012 and again in 2014’s “Interstellar,” now a decade ago. Joining him for a third film has her at a loss for words.

“I have so many feelings about it that I don’t even know how to articulate. It fills me with so much joy, and I don’t know how to talk about it,” she says. “I love Chris and Emma Nolan so much, and to be invited into their world is, I mean, I know from experience it’s one of the best places you can find yourself. Getting to be invited twice really felt like something, three felt like it would’ve been greedy, so I never let myself hope that that would happen, and that it has makes me emotional, to be perfectly honest. It makes me feel like I’m doing something right.”

Between the two Nolan films she won the Oscar for “Les Misérables.” Coming back into Nolan’s universe for “Interstellar” after the intensity of the Oscars experience was “vitalizing, reviving, encouraging, and it was just a gift in that moment.” 

“Getting ‘Interstellar’ at any point in your life would have been a career highlight. The moment that I got to go into that world, for me personally, it was the safest and most exhilarating place I could ever be as an actor and as a human,” she says. 

Hathaway has started producing through her company Somewhere Projects, including this year’s “The Idea of You,” putting her more in the driver’s seat. In the days following this interview, news broke that she and “The Idea of You” director Michael Showalter will next team together on an adaptation of Colleen Hoover’s “Verity,” which Hathaway will star in and serve as a producer on. As she now mulls over scripts with the goal of producing, she remains as interested as ever in showing her range. 

“When you’re introduced to the world through comedy and drama comes next, which is just what happened to me, I think that versatility becomes something that is a very important part of your skillset,” she says. “Given the fact that I didn’t go to drama school, and I did start as young as I did, so much of my learning happened on set in real time in the films that I was in. And it was amazing because so many of the directors that I’ve worked with are master directors in terms of the level they’re at with their craft. It also meant that I would hunt down a three-scene part in a director’s piece if they were amazing, and then I would try to do my best in that work and try to become better in real time on the set that I was on.

“And so I’m really excited that I’m an actor who’s had a career that spans decades, and one of the things that I’m just really proud of is that at this stage in my career, directors can see me in a whole lot of different types of parts, and that wasn’t something I think anybody anticipated on Day One.”

She names Emma Seligman and Maggie Gyllenhaal as directors on her radar at the moment, as well as a wish list item that comes as a surprise: 

“I haven’t made a great Christmas movie,” she says. “I know that’s a weird bucket list thing, but I’m desperate to make a Christmas movie.”

Her career has already checked boxes many movie stars take decades to work through. She’s done indie, she’s done box-office smash hits, there has been both comedy and drama, there have been awards. And with all that under her belt she’s now found herself in a sweet spot, working harder than ever and enjoying the ride. 

“There’s a lot of different ways your career can go as an actor, and I’m very, very, very aware of that,” she says, “and I’m genuinely amazed that this is the version that I’m having.”

Photographs by Heather Hazzan
Syled by Alex Badia
Senior Market Editor, Accessories: Thomas Waller
Women’s Fashion Market Editor: Emily Mercer
DP Grayson Kohs
Motion Stills Grayson Kohs + Heather Hazzan
Creative Set Design Calvy Click
Makeup by Gucci Westman
Hair by Orlando Pita
Nails by Jin Soon Choi
Movement Coach: Dani Vitale
Fashion Assistants: Ari Stark & Kimberly Infante
Lighting VSNY Films
Photo Assistant Paigge Warton
Film Process/Scan/Prints, Stills phtsdr
Film Process/Scan, Motion Metropolis
Post Production, Stills phtsdr
Post Production, Motion Stills Alberto Maro
Studio Daylight Flatiron
Hathaway’s Facial by Georgia Louise