Anne Hathaway has revealed she doesn’t believe in “milestones” that come with certain ages, as per her latest interview, and doesn’t really reflect much on the prospect of turning 40.
The actress, who turned 40 in November 2022 (and is now 41), spoke with The New York Times about finding the idea of entering her 40s not particularly remarkable.
When asked what she thought of the idea of hitting a “middle age” per se, she responded: “I don’t take it that seriously. There are so many other things I identify as milestones.”
She mentioned her journey with sobriety, which she keeps more private, adding: “I don’t normally talk about it, but I am over five years sober. That feels like a milestone to me.”
“Forty feels like a gift. The fact of the matter is I hesitate at calling things ‘middle age’ simply because I can be a semantic stickler and I could get hit by a car later today. We don’t know if this is middle age. We don’t know anything.”
Anne further spoke about the concept of treating each day as if it were her last, saying: “As a formerly chronically stressed young woman, I just remember thinking one day: You are taking this for granted.”
© Getty Images“You are taking your life for granted. You have no idea. Something could fall through the sky, and that would be lights out. So when I find the old instincts rising, I just tell myself, ‘You are not going to die stressed.'” She surmised that drinking was “probably” her way of dealing with her stress and not feeling comfortable in her own skin.
In a previous interview with Vanity Fair, she expanded more upon the idea of giving up drinking over five years ago. “I knew deep down it wasn’t for me. And it just felt so extreme to have to say, ‘But none?’ But none.”
© Getty ImagesThe Princess Diaries star continued: “If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it.”
She explained that none of this came from a place of just thinking it was the “right” thing to do, rather that it just personally mattered. “It’s a path everybody has to walk for themselves.”
© Getty Images“My personal experience with it is that everything is better. For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow. The thing that I have faith in is that everybody else is going to have one or two drinks, and by the time everybody gets to two drinks, you’ll feel like you’ve had two drinks – but without the hangover.”
Anne emphasized that she felt much better about herself now than when she was much younger and was taking better care of herself and her physical and mental health.
© Instagram“I make a lot of my lifestyle choices in service of supporting mental health,” she said. “I stopped participating in things that I know to be draining or can cause spirals,” adding: “I actually don’t have a relationship with myself online.”
Anne Hathaway’s Secrets to Staying Strong & Sculpted in Her 40s
Since the early 2000s, Anne Hathaway has been delivering one amazing performance after the next. Her breakout role was Princess Mia Thermopolis in Disney’s Princess Diaries films. She then went on to appear in Ella Enchanted, The Devil Wears Prada, and Les Miserables, which won her an Oscar. Hathaway more recently portrayed a single mom who falls for a boy band member in The Idea Of You. It’s no secret that the 42-year-old actress has an extremely impressive figure, and her former trainer, Ramona Braganza, shared with Women’s Health exactly how Anne Hathaway stays in shape.
1. She Streams Music While Exercising
Hathaway, like many other gym goers, loves streaming a playlist while working out. Music can serve as a great way to pass the time while exercising.
During the celeb’s sweat sessions with Braganza, the music was always pumping. “For most actresses, training in a gym can be monotonous, so we’d use music during workouts,” Braganza shared.
2. She Warms Up
Hathaway and Braganza began their training sessions with a solid warm-up. Braganza shared some of the go-to moves they did, telling Women’s Health. “We often warmed up by doing sun salutations. Or a dance warm-up. I enjoy leading as I have a background as an NFL cheerleader which helps.”
3. Working Out Gives Her a Confidence Boost
Braganza also pointed out that exercising gave Hathaway confidence. (And we all know just how great a successful workout can make us feel!)
“On the day of the Oscars, we pushed for a big pump for Anne since it helped her mental state,” she said. “Confidence comes from within and when you feel your muscles contract, or even if you’re just a little sore, then you’re more aware of your posture, too.”
4. She Walks
Another fitness habit that keeps Hathaway fit? She gets her steps in.
Braganza shared with Women’s Health that she thinks walking is a great workout and recommends it to all her clients. “Going for walks are always included in my clients’ programmes, since it’s important to have a nice break from indoor training,” she said.
5. She Takes Days Off
Hathaway makes sure to work out on a regular basis, but she also doesn’t push her body to its limits.
“Rest days are so important,” Braganza stressed. “When we trained for Anne’s two films, we made sure she took at least one day a week off for recovery.”
6. She Includes Variety in Her Fitness Routine
Hathaway performs a variety of workouts to stay in shape.
“We’d use my 321 Training Method,” Braganza told Women’s Health. “It involves cardio, circuit and core work, using resistance tools to achieve strength. For Anne in particular, we worked on her arms to accentuate her back and support her posture while wearing a gown at the Oscars.”
The actress posed for a mirror selfie on a Pilates reformer, which provides a great total-body workout. She also took up yoga when prepping for her role as Rebekah in the series WeCrashed. “I did get very into yoga, and I actually really want to thank my teacher Nikki Baksh, who worked with me every single day,” Hathaway said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Baksh shared the clip on her feed, captioning it, “Thank you for the shout out, Annie. Your light continues to shine brightly on and offscreen.”
Anne Hathaway on How She Overcame Being a “Chronically Stressed Young Woman” in Hollywood
“I didn’t know how to breathe,” the Oscar-winning actress said of how stress used to impact her.
Anne Hathaway is opening up about how stress impacted her earlier in her acting career and how she finally learned to manage it.
During an interview on The New York Times podcast The Interview, the Oscar-winning actress shared that she has likely played “chronically stressed out young women” because she used to be “a really stressed out young woman” in real life.
“I was a really stressed out young woman,” Hathaway recalled. “And as a formerly chronically stressed young woman, which leads to, you know, all manner of things, I just remember thinking one day, ‘You are taking this for granted, you are taking your life for granted,’” referring to her career success at the time.
She added, “You have no idea. Something could fall through the sky and that will be lights out for you. So when I find myself, like, the old instincts rising, I just tell myself, I’m like, ‘You are not gonna die stressed.’”
When podcast host David Marchese asked The Idea of You star what was the source of the stress, she responded, “I didn’t know how to breathe yet. And that was really complicated. That was really, really complicated not knowing how to breathe.”
Hathaway explained that “literally everything” in her personal life as a young woman rising to fame in Hollywood caused her stress at one point or another, adding, “I was just very, very, very in my head, about a lot of things.”
The Les Misérables actress also noted that she felt “somatic” stress, which meant she had physical symptoms as well as mental.
“I was just stuck in this feeling,” Hathaway added later. “It’s that thing about, I want to achieve things, I want to grow, and you think, mistakenly, that the way you do that is to be really hard on yourself. You drive yourself by self-criticism.”
However, she was finally able to change her mindset years later when she realized that “in order to keep that narrative alive, I was going to have to deny so much. I just said, ‘You’re just going to have to accept that if nothing else happens to you, you’ve had a really great life. You have been given gifts and opportunities. And for you to continue to walk on this path, not being grateful, I don’t think that’s really who you are.’ It felt like a light went on.”
Now, in her 40s and as a mother of two young boys, The Princess Diaries actress said she’s learned “to heal” her anxiety and “not relive it.”
“I work hard to just be present,” Hathaway shared. “Like I said, I’m more grateful. I’m more settled in myself. I’m less afraid of things not happening.”
Anne Hathaway opens up about having a miscarriage while playing a pregnant character in one-woman show
‘I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal’
Anne Hathaway has hinted in the past that her journey to motherhood was a complicated one. Now, the 41-year-old is getting candid about her history of miscarriage.
The Idea of You star opened up to Vanity Fair about what she meant when she shared news that she was expecting her second child on Facebook in 2019. At the time, Anne wrote, ‘It’s not for a movie…. All kidding aside, for everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love.’
Anne told Vanity Fair that she felt ‘pain’ when she was trying to get pregnant. ‘It would’ve felt disingenuous to post something all the way happy when I know the story is much more nuanced than that for everyone,’ she explained.
Anne said that she had a miscarriage in 2015 while doing the one-woman off-Broadway show Grounded. ‘The first time it didn’t work out for me,’ she said. ‘I was doing a play and I had to give birth onstage every night.’
She said she told friends about what had happened backstage after her performances. ‘It was too much to keep it in when I was onstage pretending everything was fine,’ she said. ‘I had to keep it real otherwise….So when it did go well for me, having been on the other side of it—where you have to have the grace to be happy for someone—I wanted to let my sisters know, “You don’t have to always be graceful. I see you and I’ve been you.”‘
Anne also said her experience with miscarriage made her question if she was to blame. ‘It’s really hard to want something so much and to wonder if you’re doing something wrong,’ she said.
Anne said that she was surprised to learn that many of her friends had also experienced a miscarriage. ‘I thought, Where is this information? Why are we feeling so unnecessarily isolated? That’s where we take on damage. So I decided that I was going to talk about it,’ she said. ‘The thing that broke my heart, blew my mind, and gave me hope was that for three years after, almost daily, a woman came up to me in tears and I would just hold her, because she was carrying this [pain] around and suddenly it wasn’t all hers anymore.’
Anne said her experience also made her feel OK being open about what she had been through. ‘I wasn’t going to feel ashamed of something that seemed to me statistically to actually be quite normal,’ she said.
Anne is now the mother of two boys— sons Jonathan, 8, and Jack, 4—with husband Adam Shulman. She said that being a mom has made her softer.
‘When I was younger, the way that I knew how to improve was by being hard on myself,’ she said. ‘There’s a ceiling to that path. I had to relearn what it means to have drive but to do it in a nurturing way.’
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