Anne Hathaway on Being 5 Years Sober: "That Feels Like a Milestone"

She's spoken about her sobriety before.

Anne Hathaway
(Image credit: Getty Images)

Anne Hathaway has spoken out about being sober before, but she's just further explained what it means for her.

In a new profile interview with the New York Times, the actress was asked about her attitude to "middle age," or having passed the arbitrary milestone of 40 (Hathaway is 41).

"I don’t take it that seriously," she answered. "There are so many other things I identify as milestones. I don’t normally talk about it, but I am over five years sober. That feels like a milestone to me."

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Age, for her, is an achievement, not a hinderance—or at least it shouldn't be.

"Forty feels like a gift," Hathaway continued. "The fact of the matter is I hesitate at calling things 'middle age' simply because I can be a semantic stickler and I could get hit by a car later today. We don’t know if this is middle age. We don’t know anything."

Speaking about her decision to stop drinking earlier this year in Vanity Fair, the actress said, "I knew deep down it wasn’t for me. And it just felt so extreme to have to say, 'But none?' But none. If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it."

Hathaway is at the center of the celeb news cycle right now thanks to her new movie The Idea of You, out now, in which she stars opposite Nicholas Galitzine. She also served as a producer on the movie, which makes it all the more personal to her.

Morning Editor

Iris Goldsztajn is a London-based journalist, editor and author. She is the morning editor at Marie Claire, and her work has appeared in the likes of British Vogue, InStyle, Cosmopolitan, Refinery29 and SELF. Iris writes about everything from celebrity news and relationship advice to the pitfalls of diet culture and the joys of exercise. She has many opinions on Harry Styles, and can typically be found eating her body weight in cheap chocolate.