Anne Hathaway Thought She Would Never Work Again After Doing ‘Love & Other Drugs’
Actor Anne Hathaway has experienced a lot of ups and downs in her career. She confided that she once had brief anxiety over not being cast in anymore future films right before she was hired for a dream role.
Anne Hathaway’s panic over her acting career only lasted for two weeks
Hathaway starred alongside Jake Gyllenhaal in the 2010 feature Love & Other Drugs. The picture was a rom-com where Hathaway played the outgoing young woman Maggie, who lived with a debilitating condition, falling for a pharmaceutical salesman. Initially, it was a movie that Hathaway wasn’t sure about starring in. According to the movie’s director Edward Zwick, Hathaway didn’t think there was enough meat on her character to sign on.
“It took her a little while to decide whether she wanted to play the part, because she said the character, the love interest the movie portrayed was too simple for her at first,” Zwick recalled in an interview with IndieWire. “It wasn’t fully reading, living and breathing for her and she’s had enough experience to say ‘Well I’m going to give you some ideas and if you’re up for that then I’ll play the part.’ As a result, I think her character, — who you meet yet you don’t know her parents, you don’t know where she comes from, you know very little about her — you know everything about her when she first comes in.”
And according to Hathaway herself, it seemed the character fulfilled all of the potential she thought she had.
“The most important thing was to make Maggie honest, and when I got the script she wasn’t completely there yet but she had amazing potential to be angry, funny, smart and incredibly wounded. The thought of combining all of those aspects into a character was a challenge but very exciting,” she said in a resurfaced interview with The Guardian.
Although Hathaway seemed satisfied with the film, and it did reasonably well at the box-office, she admitted she was unsure she’d find work again afterwards.
“I wrapped Love and Other Drugs, I had a two week panic that I was never going to work again, and then I got sent One Day and then it became a full frontal assault to get the part,” Hathaway said to Shock Ya in 2011.
What was the movie Anne Hathaway did right after ‘Love & Other Drugs?’
One Day made sure that Hathaway didn’t have to worry too long about her career. The film was a period piece first set in the 1980s, and followed the relationship of a young couple that would meet each other every July 15th. Hathaway wanted to do the film so badly that she even remembered the exact date she read the script. After reading the material, Hathaway personally pitched herself to the film’s director Lone Scherfig.
“So I read it I think around December – I can’t believe I remember these dates – I think I read it December 17th and by January 2nd I had gotten myself to London and I was sitting at a club talking with Lone, trying to explain to her why I ought to play Emma Morley and failing miserably; it was the worst meeting I ever had! I just, in desperation, wrote down a bunch of song titles for her to say, ‘I think this is where Emma and I overlap,’ and so I communicated through other people’s music,” she said.
The Dark Knight Rises star was overjoyed when she finally clinched the role, especially when it reminded her of another layered character she played years prior.
“Well, it’s a really wonderful thing to find a character that’s honest and complex and beautifully drawn and Emma was the most honest, complex, beautifully drawn character that I’d found since Kim in Rachel Getting Married and I shot that in the fall of 2007,” she said. “Clearly there’s some time between the ones that you find, so when you find it, I try to not leave any stone unturned until I’m given the opportunity. The problem is, is that then you get the opportunity and you’re like, ‘I got it! … Oh god! What am I going to do with it?’ And then it becomes another set of emotions that you have to deal with.”
