Anne Hathaway talks about her life-changing movie role

Anne Hathaway in "Rachel Getting Married"

Anne Hathaway became famous for her starring role in "The Princess Diaries" movies, and it would've been easy for her to be typecast as the plucky heroine in comedic "chick flicks." But she's avoided that pitfall by branching out into doing critically acclaimed roles in emotionally heavy dramas (such as 2005’s "Brokeback Mountain" and 2008’s "Rachel Getting Married"), which showcase her versatile talent. The actress has received her first Academy Award nomination for "Rachel Getting Married," in which she plays a recovering drug addict named Kym, who faces her personal demons as she attends her sister Rachel’s wedding celebration.

The Oscar nomination capped off a year of extreme highs and lows for Hathaway: She had blockbuster hit with the 2008 movie version of "Get Smart" but she also had a very public and scandalous breakup with Raffaello Follieri, her boyfriend of four years who was later imprisoned for fraud, money laundering and conspiracy. Hathaway wouldn’t talk about her personal life in this interview, but she did reveal how she was affected by "Rachel Getting Married," the movie that would change her life.

Your character Kym in "Rachel Getting Married" seems so unlike the way you are in real life. How would you describe her?

She’s an overwhelming person. Everything about her is extreme. She’s not given naturally to change herself to fit a situation. That’s who she is, even before she was an addict. She was very much herself, very headstrong, very opinionated. And then you throw in the fact that she’s in recovery, and it’s vital to her survival in order to be honest at all times. And she’s going home — on the surface — to attend her sister’s wedding, but I always thought of it as Kym fighting for her place in her family. And she’s going to spend time with people who, all they want her to do, at least for one weekend, is pretend that she’s not who she is. There’s such great conflict … It really helped the development of the character.

"Rachel Getting Married" was shot documentary-style. How did you adjust to that?

To be honest, I didn’t have a difficult or challenging time on this movie. I loved my character. I had a year to prepare, so I felt really solid and grounded in who she was.

How did you prepare to play a drug addict?

I went to meetings [for substance abusers] and talked to people in recovery. A lot of my friends are in recovery, so I was getting their take on it, sharing the ["Rachel Getting Married"] story and getting their impressions about Kym and the family. I read a lot of books; just basically immersed myself in the [drug] culture. And I was also doing mini-portraits, not with painting but with words, of what Kym was like. Like in certain scenes, thinking of her as a marathon runner and her hitting a wall and still having to move on, and what that would feel like and look like.

Was there anything in "Rachel Getting Married" that wasn’t originally in the script?

The second [recovering-addicts] meeting scene was originally a one-on-one scene in a restaurant with the character of Kieran, which is played wonderfully by Mather Zickel. But then Jonathan [Demme, the director of "Rachel Getting Married"] changed it to a [recovering addicts] meeting, and I was really frightened by that because I thought, "Oh my God, this is really exposed." But Jonathan was right. It needed to be that exposed and shared with people: the ability to speak about this thing that so defines her with people in an emotionally open, nonjudgmental environment.

What do you and the character of Kym have in common?

It’s too personal to talk about. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. Kym is a creation and observation of what I’ve experienced in my life.

Kym sort of lives her life like an irresponsible, decadent rock star. What rock star, living or dead, would you want to portray on screen?

I’d love to play Karen Dalton [the late folk singer whom Bob Dylan once cited as his favorite artist]. Love her. She was amazing and very complicated.