Anne Hathaway has revealed she spent an entire week preparing to play Harley Quinn before discovering that Christopher Nolan actually wanted her for Catwoman, and had to perform a rapid mid-meeting personality change to salvage the situation.
Speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Hathaway described the elaborate reasoning that led her to the wrong conclusion ahead of her meeting with Nolan for The Dark Knight Rises.
“I knew I was auditioning for… I was meeting with Chris for the female role in the Batman trilogy, the next installment. I thought that I’d gamed it out, because I was just like, ‘It can’t be Catwoman because Michelle Pfeiffer was so iconic… It’s going to be Harley Quinn!'”
Armed with that conviction, she spent a week preparing.
“I spent a week developing demonic Harley Quinn energy. I was wearing weird jester flats and a striped top,” she said.
Then, two hours into what she had presumably assumed was a very productive meeting, Nolan revealed the truth.
“Chris is like, ‘So, the part’s Catwoman,’ and I was like, ‘Transform!'”
Her pivot was immediate.
“I just then decided that I was like, ‘Well, this top is very sensual.’ And I was going to be very… like a psychopath. I changed personalities like a psychopath.”
The rapid recalibration clearly worked.
Hathaway got the role and went on to earn considerable praise for her portrayal of Selina Kyle in the 2012 film.
It was the beginning of a significant creative partnership with Nolan. The director cast her again as NASA scientist Dr Amelia Brand in Interstellar in 2014, a role that carried particular significance given the difficult period Hathaway was navigating at the time.
She has spoken candidly about the public backlash that followed her Oscar win for Les Misérables, which turned her into something of a cultural punchline.
“A lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online,” she told Vanity Fair in 2024.
“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.”
The pair are reuniting once again for The Odyssey, which opens in cinemas on 17 July from Universal Pictures.
Presumably this time Hathaway knew exactly which character she was playing before the meeting.
