Anne Hathaway has been acting for nearly 20 years and has an Academy Award, but she still gets surprised when she’s sent certain scripts! In Serenity, the actress, 36, plays the stunning Karen Zariakas, who asks her ex-husband (Matthew McConaughey) to kill her abusive current husband (Jason Clarke).
Karen is extremely different from the characters that Hathaway usually plays – and when she was offered the role, she was actually in awe.
“I’m not the hot blonde in Hollywood. I often get sent the grown-up girl next door,” she told Us Weekly exclusively at Cinema Society and Aviron Pictures’ premiere on Wednesday, January 23. “It was painful to go into this space because everything about her is controlled by an abusive husband. So, everything about her has been conformed to the male gaze without her input. That is what I chafe against in this world! So, it was challenging and an incredible opportunity. I’m so happy they thought of me.”
However, the idea of something fresh wasn’t the only reason she was drawn to the role.
“No. 1 was Matthew was already attached to it and our tastes tend to skew similar, so I knew there was probably something in it that I’d love,” she said of her costar, who she first starred with in 2014’s Interstellar. ”I was also a huge fan of [director] Steven Knight. Then I read how Karen was described, and I couldn’t believe I was being sent it!”
McConaughey also opened up to Us about his reunion with “real pro” Hathaway – which included a bar crawl in Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
“She’s as good as it gets between action and cut, in my opinion. She’s fully consumed and obsessed with the work we have to do that day – and that’s not laborious, that’s actually relaxing because for 12 hours when you’re working, it’s full concentration on her end,” the Golden Globe winner, 49, said. “She asks great questions, she does her homework, she shows up prepared. We also don’t always agree! We enjoy disagreeing. We give each other, I think, a good bit of resistance. What I mean by that is that sometimes, we perform better with more resistance, more to overcome. With her, we have good resistance and yet we really respect each other as peers.”
Serenity is in theaters Friday, January 25.
