Anne Hathaway Reveals The One Rule She Loves To Break

Anne Hathaway is, clearly, the normest (and nicest) of normcore. While tooling around Long Island with her, it‘s easy to forget that, at 32, she‘s among the most accomplished actresses of her generation. In fact, it‘s easy to forget that even when not tooling around with her, since social media doesn‘t remind us daily that she‘s appeared in dozens of films since her 2001 breakthrough in The Princess Diaries, a startling number of them critically acclaimed. She‘s toggled between crowd-pleasers like The Devil Wears Prada and intense dramas like Brokeback Mountain and Interstellar. She‘s been rewarded with one Oscar win (for Les Misérables in 2012) and another nomination (for Rachel Getting Married in 2008). But, at a time when media attention tends to favor extremes — aspirational goddesses like Beyoncé, selfie queens like Kim Kardashian, and impossibly cool girls like Jennifer Lawrence — Hathaway tries to disappear when she‘s not working, a quality that doesn‘t translate on Twitter and Instagram.

In her newest film, The Intern, a comedy directed by Nancy Meyers that‘s in theaters September 25, Hathaway plays the founder of a Brooklyn-based internet fashion company who‘s struggling to keep her home life together — she‘s also a wife and mom — while her website expands into the e-commerce stratosphere. She finds salvation in her company‘s new ’senior intern“ program — specifically, the retired business executive played by Robert DeNiro. Her character, Jules, is driven, caring, passionate, perfectionistic — exactly the kind of career woman many of us strive to be, and exactly the kind that Hathaway is. ’I don‘t always relate to my characters, but Jules I really did,“ she says over lunch before our little road adventure. ’It‘s hard to be a person making mistakes in the spotlight, and I related to her on that level. But she is someone who is handling her stress pretty well.“