Anne Hathaway has revealed that she spent an entire week preparing to play Harley Quinn before discovering that Christopher Nolan really wanted her for Catwoman and had to perform a quick personality change mid-meeting to save the situation.
Talking about the Happy Sad Confused In the podcast, Hathaway described the elaborate reasoning that led her to the wrong conclusion before her meeting with Nolan to The dark knight rises.
“I knew I was auditioning to… I was meeting Chris for the female role in the movie. Ordinance trilogy, the next installment. I thought I was over it, because I thought, ‘It can’t be catwoman because Michelle Pfeiffer was so iconic… She’s going to be Harley Quinn!'”
Armed with that conviction, she spent a week preparing.
“I spent a week developing Harley Quinn’s demonic energy. She was wearing these weird flat jester shoes and a striped top,” he said.
Then, two hours into what he had presumably assumed would be a very productive meeting, Nolan revealed the truth.
“Chris said, ‘So the role is Catwoman,’ and I said, ‘Transform!'”
His turnaround was immediate.
“At that moment I decided I was like, ‘Well, this top is very sexy.’ And I was going to be very… like a psychopath. I changed my personality like a psychopath.”
The quick recalibration clearly worked.
Hathaway landed the role and received considerable praise for her performance as Selina Kyle in the 2012 film.
It was the beginning of an important creative partnership with Nolan. The director cast her again as NASA scientist Dr. Amelia Brand in Interstellar in 2014, a role that was especially important given the difficult period Hathaway was going through at the time.
He has spoken candidly about the public reaction that followed his Oscar win for Les Misérableswhich made it a kind of cultural auction.
“A lot of people didn’t give me papers because they were so worried about how toxic my online identity had become,” she said. vanity fair in 2024.
“I had an angel in Christopher Nolan, who didn’t care about that and gave me one of the most beautiful roles I’ve ever had in one of the best movies I’ve ever been a part of.”
The pair will reunite once again for The Odyssey, which opens in theaters July 17 from Universal Pictures.
Presumably, this time Hathaway knew exactly which character she would be playing before the meeting.
