Anne Hathaway is currently gearing up for her third starring role for director Christopher Nolan—courtesy of The Odyssey, where she’ll play Greece’s hottest (apparent) widow—but that long association doesn’t automatically translate into being able to predict the Oscar winner. That became very apparent in a recent conversation Hathaway had with Josh Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast, where she admits she spent the first two hours of her professional relationship with Nolan assuming she was auditioning for the part of Harley Quinn in, uh, The Dark Knight Rises.
“I thought that I’d gamed it out, because I was just like, ‘It can’t be Catwoman, because Michelle Pfeiffer was so iconic,” Hathaway said of her past predictive abilities. “It’s going to be Harley Quinn!” She says she spent a week “developing demonic Harley Quinn energy” ahead of talking to Nolan, who apparently likes a long chat with actors before getting down to brass tacks about a project. “And then, about two hours into our conversation, Chris is like, ‘So, the part’s Catwoman,’” at which point, Hathaway says she executed a full-bore personality shift, “Like a psychopath. I changed personalities like a psychopath.” (Hathaway’s Odyssey co-star Tom Holland helpfully chimes in at this point to note “Or like Harley Quinn!”)
Hathaway can be forgiven for thinking Nolan might have gone the Harley route, given how few female antagonists Batman’s rogue gallery features. (Poison Ivy is presumably too fantastical to work in Nolan’s grounded Dark Knight universe, while Rises ended up going with takes on Catwoman and the lesser-known Talia al Ghul.) Hathaway doesn’t bear Nolan any ill-will for the self-inflicted bait-and-switch, meanwhile; she explicitly credits him with helping to revive her career after the disaster of her other big 2012 offering, Les Misérables, saying of his decision to cast her in Intersteller that “I had an angel in Christopher Nolan, who did not care about that and gave me one of the most beautiful roles I’ve had in one of the best films that I’ve been a part of.”
Keep scrolling for more great stories.