Anne Hathaway Opens Up About Her ‘Hard’ Experience Portraying a Pop Star in ‘Mother Mary’

Getting into character to play the titular pop star in her upcoming flick Mother Mary was intimidating for Anne Hathaway.

The 42-year-old, who plays a singer who flees her tour during an emotional crisis to seek out an old friend, recently admitted to Vogue that she didn’t have the luxury to prep her rock-star vocals.

“If I’d had the music a year before we ever turned a camera on, I would have tattooed every note of it on my soul, and there would have been a whole process, very specific,” the Oscar winner told the outlet. “And that was not available to me.”

Instead, she hit the set cold and learned as she went along. “I had to submit to being a beginner,” she explained. “The humility of that — showing up every day knowing that you’re going to suck. And it has to be OK. You’re not ‘bad.’ You’re just a beginner.”

Hathaway had to get comfortable with letting go of control. “It was hard,” she told the outlet. “The way transformational experiences can be hard.”

Posing in style among great works of art for the fashion bible, Anne called the role one of her most challenging. Indeed, during the shoot, she and costar Michaela Coel would blow off steam at techno clubs — a far cry from her quiet life in New York City with husband Adam Shulman and their two kids. Her preferred activity? “Hanging out.” Adam, she said “is a great cook and an early riser.”