Anne Hathaway Shows Us Her Wild Side
By Kelly Marages
FAMILY AFFAIR: Hathaway's cute older brother, Michael, who showed up at the shoot, says he has her back.
Photo Credit: Kristen Schaefer
At 13, she joined a local theater group, got an agent, and started doing commercials. During her senior year, she won a role on the short-lived TV series Get Real and moved to L.A. "I got to come home for the final two months of senior year when everybody was slacking off, and we got to do stupid things like, you know, steal people's lawn ornaments and redistribute them around the neighborhood," she laughs. Even Hathaway-the-Degenerate has a certain wholesomeness about her.
She went to Vassar for three semesters, then transferred to NYU. Following Ella and Havoc (her one straight-to-DVD flop), the chance to work with director Ang Lee beckoned — and suddenly the latte-sipping life of an undergrad lost all its luster. (Even now she gushes, "I told him if he ever needs an assistant, I will drop whatever project I am working on just to make him coffee.") After she had auditioned, Lee gave her the role of Jake Gyllenhaal's cowgirl wife in 2005's Brokeback Mountain.
"I had such a cool experience," she says. "I was like, Hells to the yeah. If this is possible once, it is worth striving for the rest of my life — to be a part of something that is so beautiful and smart, that is the best this medium can be."
That said, the first time she saw the film, at the Venice Film Festival, alongside Lee and costars Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, she almost didn't make it through. "I'm not in the movie until, like, 45 minutes into it, and I start to get sick to my stomach that I'm gonna be the one to fuck it up. So right before I come on-screen, I run outside, because I can't handle it."
Eventually, she calmed down, came back in, and watched without incident — until the last scene, when she burst into tears. "Didn't stop for an hour," she laughs. "And Kirsten Dunst, who was going out with Jake, was like two rows behind me, and [Jake's sister] Maggie Gyllenhaal was right behind me, and we were all crying so hard; my boyfriend offered Maggie his handkerchief, and she was sharing it with Kirsten. And I'm thinking, That's my boyfriend's — can I have my Kleenex that you bitches are using?" she says, her voice breaking into high-pitched hysterics.
To read more of Anne Hathaway's cover story, check out the August 2007 issue, on newsstands now.
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