“Eileen” unleashes a darker, sinister Anne Hathaway — and even she was scared

The Oscar-winning actress talks to EW about kissing girls and elbow-smashing men in William Oldroyd's adaptation of Ottessa Moshfegh's thrilling novel.

Even Anne Hathaway has trouble accepting that it is, in fact, the Anne Hathaway she sees slinking through the twisting, camp-chaos thrills within the new big-screen adaptation of author Otessa Moshfegh’s novel Eileen.

The Devil Wears Prada and Princess Diaries actress knows you’re not used to watching her waft into frame in the guise of prison psychiatrist Rebecca Saint John, draped in a billowy cloud of freshly puffed cigarette smoke, wearing vintage tweed skirt-suits meticulously styled under waves of platinum blonde hair. Atop it all, she's kissing girls, screaming at the top of her lungs, smacking wine bottles against a wall, and elbow-smashing men in the face. If she’s honest, it kind of scares her, too.

“To play anybody that’s a bit heightened, especially when you’re someone who, shall we say, I’ve become familiar to audiences, to know that you’re shaking up what maybe they’ve come to expect from you — from the way you sound to the way you walk to the color of your hair to the fact that you smoke — I had a bit of fear about whether or not the audience would lean in with me in this performance,” Hathaway tells EW of her character, whose beauty and allure bewitch the titular, lonely secretary (Thomasin McKenzie) to do some very exciting — and very bad — things in Lady Macbeth director William Oldroyd’s latest. “[It’s a] tightrope walk between the fact that she’s a creation, but she also has a real heart. There’s a real person inside all that glamor, and it’s a very fine balance.”

In essence, Eileen presents Hathaway like you’ve never seen before, in one of her most exciting performances to date. She says she had to be “calibrated just right” to channel Rebecca’s scintillating, sometimes disturbing nature, as she navigates a story that culminates in a blindsiding discovery that upends both womens’ lives amid the dreary backdrop of 1960s suburban America.

Along the way, Hathaway learned to love the playful, intriguing, and sinister sides of Rebecca, all of which present Eileen, who lost her mother years prior, with a guiding light of tantalizing female allure that's largely missing from her adult life.

Hathaway embraced an element of performance within a performance through Rebecca’s physicality, knowing that she could hook both her audience and Eileen on the character’s outward charm, before luring them in to explore the complex layers that lead to the movie’s shocking, crime-filled climax. She also immediately captured the attention of Oldroyd, who singles out a highlight in production during a day-one sequence they filmed inside a bar that involved Hathaway dancing, drinking, and tussling with a handsy patron.

“It was a thrill,” he remembers of following Hathaway’s lead on the clear vision she had for taking Rebecca off the rails with a slow-burning, ominous performance that’s still rare among Hathaway’s growing filmography 20 years into her Hollywood career. “What’s great about Annie is she has a very sure idea of what she would like to play. Her instincts are so good. She’s so brilliant at understanding who Rebecca is that she brought this, and then unleashed Rebecca.”

Oldroyd enlisted choreographers for both dance and combat for the bar scene, which sees Rebecca and Eileen cement their bond over a five-page monologue that sinks Rebecca’s claws into her colleague for good. Their boozy evening reaches a fever pitch when a man threatens to burst the dreamy bubble they’ve created for each other, and Rebecca seals it up with a sweet kiss in the snow.

“Someone’s sweet nothing can be another person’s desperate everything. I think that there’s a carelessness to the connection that Rebecca puts out there,” Hathaway explains of the screen, adding that she enjoyed taking the wheel at this significant point in Rebecca’s overall plot. “She just wants an audience, and Eileen just wants love — and really needs it.”

Just how the delicate kiss turns sinful, in more unexpected ways than one might initially presume, is too good to spoil here, but Oldroyd and Hathaway cite it as one of the film’s key moments.

“If you kiss someone goodbye on your way home after a couple of drinks in the bar and drive off, it can explode that person’s life,” Oldroyd says. Adds Hathaway, “Rebecca really likes lighting matches and threatening to put it next to a stick of TNT, but I don’t really think she likes to hang around for the explosion.”

Thankfully, the audience will, and the reward is watching a glorious portrait of Hathaway, unchained and untethered from all the Chanel boots and royal Genovian thrones of her past.

Eileen hits theaters in limited release on Friday via Neon, followed by a nationwide rollout on Dec. 8.

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