Anne Hathaway is standing in my kitchen perusing my selection of herbal teas. This wasn’t the plan. We spent several days debating if we should meet for this interview at a fancy uptown sushi restaurant, a cheap diner, or the lobby of an elegant hotel. But, when today rolled around, she said she’d rather come over, play with my kids, and chat in the comfort of my kitchen. Hathaway has a habit of landing on the path of least resistance, which I’ve long admired. Keep it calma, one might say. And honestly, why pay $85 for a California roll when you can play peekaboo with two of the cutest kids in New York City?

Anne Hathaway is standing in my kitchen perusing my selection of herbal teas. This wasn’t the plan. We spent several days debating if we should meet for this interview at a fancy uptown sushi restaurant, a cheap diner, or the lobby of an elegant hotel. But, when today rolled around, she said she’d rather come over, play with my kids, and chat in the comfort of my kitchen. Hathaway has a habit of landing on the path of least resistance, which I’ve long admired. Keep it calma, one might say. And honestly, why pay $85 for a California roll when you can play peekaboo with two of the cutest kids in New York City?

Now, at 41, Annie has been in more than 50 films ranging from low-budget indies to major motion pictures. She’s been nominated for every performance award in existence, won an Oscar (for 2012’s Les Miserables), and even hosted the Oscars in 2011 (“badly,” she adds). At 29, she married Adam Shulman (the bride wore a dress by her dear friend Valentino, of course), and they have two sons. And, she looks divine. The current face of Versace, Bulgari, and Shiseido, she has become a beloved fashion figure who’s as familiar in the front rows of New York and Milan fashion weeks as a certain well-known Devil-ish fashion editrix.

When we settle in at the kitchen table and flip on the recorder, Annie observes how much has changed in the last two decades. Gone are our days as eager teens brunching at downtown hotspots. Two parents replace them cuddled in uptown apartments wondering if it’s too late to drink tea with caffeine. (After much debate, we decided on a pot of caffeine-free Korean moonwalk tea.) But, one topic that we’ll never get bored of is fashion.

Like the rest of the style world, Annie was mesmerized by John Galliano’s epic, sweeping, haunting couture collection for Maison Margiela, which debuted in January in Paris, and is what she wears on one of the covers of this very issue of V. “I thought it was extraordinary. I got really into the leather work, the way it created a porcelain effect and the craft of it. The production value of the show, the way they combined dancers and models, the movement, it was so beautiful—the broken umbrella!” she says. When conceptualizing the shoot with Stephen Gan, V’s founder, and the creative director, “I mentioned how much I love menswear and how I am drawn to the visual language of masculine/feminine. And the shoot grew out from there.”

We could talk about fashion for hours–“the makeup is snatched,” the shoot was “fashion but make it fashion”–so it’s a little surprising when Annie reveals she doesn’t truly identify as a fashion person. “I really don’t,” she insists. “I view myself more as a guest.” Conjuring Emily Blunt in The Devil Wears Prada, I sip tea dramatically while giving her a quizzical look. “I think it’d be an insult to someone whose education revolved around it, whose life revolves around it, who has done a full fashion cycle in multiple cities as opposed to just, like, getting invited to a show and an after-party. I think there’s a degree of stamina and schlepping involved in being a proper fashion person. I’m very grateful to be a guest. I mean, I’ve studied it, but it’s informal. I’m aware of the history. I love fashion photography. And I’ve been welcomed for a long time and been shown great kindness and generosity by people whose lives it is. But I’m an actress first.”

Oh yeah, her day job. This May, she’s starring in The Idea of You as Solène Marchand, a movie that has been described as the story of a single mother falling in love with Harry Styles at Coachella, except it’s not Harry and they didn’t shoot at Coachella. “Notchella!” she smiles. (The majority of the film was made in Georgia, which was a double for California and every other stop on a European stadium tour.) When her character brings her daughter to the Coachella Music Festival, she accidentally meets Hayes Campbell of the boy band phenom August Moon and embarks on an unexpected love affair. “It is this story about a single mother fully embracing her sexuality at a time in her life and a woman’s life where, traditionally, we begin to be erased.”

Hayes is played by 29-year-old Nicholas Galitzine, who starred in 2023’s Red, White, and Royal Blue and Bottoms, and will also appear opposite Julianne Moore in this year’s Mary & George. He may not have been in One Direction but he has the charisma of a boy wonder. “We had met several young men already, but I remember laughing when Nick walked in because he was so ridiculously perfect for the part. I just thought he was it,” she says. But, she still asked all the right questions. “Is he gonna be able to read the lines? Read the lines, great. Okay, can you sing? Oh, my God, he can sing. Wait and he can play the guitar? Okay, and he’s just fun to be around. He’s just charming. Like, he’s just charmed this entire room.”

It’s important to note Hathaway is a producer on this film. That comes in handy when advocating for herself in film projects and developing new ways to go about things, like chemistry tests. “Back in the 2000s—and this did happen to me—it was considered normal to ask an actor to make out with other actors to test for chemistry. Which is the worst way to do it,” she says. “I was told, ‘We have ten guys coming today and you’re cast. Aren’t you excited to make out with all of them?’ And I thought, ‘Is there something wrong with me?’ because I wasn’t excited. I thought it sounded gross. And I was so young and terribly aware of how easy it was to lose everything by being labeled ‘difficult,’ so I just pretended I was excited and got on with it. It wasn’t a power play, no one was trying to be awful or hurt me. It was just a very different time and now we know better.”

As a producer who’s been a working actor for more than half of her life, Hathaway knew that finding a spark didn’t require her to make out with a bunch of twenty-somethings. So, how did they go about getting the right guy? “We asked each of the actors coming in to choose a song that they felt their character would love, that they would put on to get my character to dance, and then we’d do a short little improv. I was sitting in a chair like we had come in from dinner or a walk or something, we pressed play, and we just started dancing together.”

Photography Akili Brown

Fashion Mixed

Makeup The Famous Lady

Hair Deloris

Manicure Deloris

Set design Akili Brown

Executive producer Akili Brown

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the Room

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