From The Odyssey to The Devil Wears Prada 2, Anne Hathaway has an exciting few years of movies coming up. And in a brand new interview with Vogue, she gave some behind-the-scenes insight into the making of one of her more mysterious upcoming projects, Mother Mary.
For context, A24’s Mother Mary does not have a release date yet, and as it stands, we don’t know a whole lot about the plot. But what we do know is that Anne will play a “sort of Gaga-Taylor Swift hybrid” pop star, named Mother Mary, who finds herself navigating some kind of existential crisis as she grapples with fame and her identity.
In the film, which Vogue describes as both “weird” and “cool,” Anne will be doing her own dancing and singing, performing original songs written by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX. And while that might sound like a lot of fun, it seems her experience on set wasn’t exactly a walk in the park.
Discussing Mother Mary, Anne said she entered the project with a lot of excitement and vulnerability. “I had to submit to being a beginner,” she said, recalling the experience of embodying a pop star. “The humility of that — showing up every day knowing you’re going to suck. And it has to be okay. You’re not ‘bad.’ You’re just a beginner. Getting to that mindset — I had to shed some things that were hard to shed. It was welcome. But it was hard, the way transformational experiences can be hard.”
The other cast includes Michaela Coel, FKA twigs, Hunter Schafer, and Kaia Gerber. And in the Vogue interview, Michaela hinted more about what viewers can expect from Anne’s “brave” performance in the film as she described a “scary” dance scene they shot. “The physicality she had to learn in preparation for this job,” she said of her costar as she remembered the “terrifying” day of filming. “That requires a lot of strength. Gallons and tons.”
If that all sounds a bit vague and scary, then just wait until you hear this story from the director, David Lowery, who recalled that Anne was forced to apologize after having some sort of breakdown during the filming of one of the movie’s climactic scenes.
“It felt like shooting Apocalypse Now,” he said. “At one point Annie broke down and said, ‘I have to apologize, because I think what’s going to come out of me will hurt you.’ And Michaela took her hands and said, ‘I love you, I trust you.’ We were in various stages of that for about a week, shooting that scene.”
