Cover Story: Anne Hathaway
In Control
Anne Hathaway plays Control’s sexiest spy, Agent 99, in the update of TV’s Get Smart. But the poised young actor admits that while her character was trying to keep Steve Carell’s bumbling Maxwell Smart together, she was losing it off screen
By Bob Thompson
Anne Hathaway’s made a point of separating herself from the fairy tale persona which arrived with her breakthrough performance in 2001’s The Princess Diaries, was reinforced in its sequel, and cemented in 2004’s Ella Enchanted.
Since then, she’s played against type as the wife of a gay cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, an abused office assistant in The Devil Wears Prada and Jane Austen in last year’s period piece Becoming Jane.
If that doesn’t make the once-upon-a-time chapter of her career go poof, this just might. Now 25, Hathaway is getting her goof on as Agent 99 opposite Steve Carell’s Maxwell Smart in the big-screen remake of the 1960s TV spy spoof Get Smart.
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Anne Hathaway and Steve Carell star in Get Smart
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The movie starts with Smart (a.k.a. Agent 86) working as a lowly analyst for the spy agency Control. But when almost all of Control’s agents have their secret identities revealed, Smart is promoted to the field. Like in the TV series, Hathaway’s 99 — the only other agent whose secret identity is still intact — spends much of her time and energy getting Carell’s incompetent 86 out of jams as he battles Control’s arch-enemy, KAOS. Alan Arkin shows up as Max’s beleaguered boss, the Chief. Dwayne Johnson plays the egocentric Agent 23 and Terence Stamp is the evil KAOS villain Siegfried.
Sounds familiar. So, besides the actors (Don Adams and Barbara Feldon played 86 and 99 in the series), what separates the new Get Smart from the old one created by Mel Brooks, Buck Henry and Leonard Stern? For one thing, the action and the special effects will be very new millennium. For another, the two main characters are expected to be a little less exaggerated than the Adams and Feldon versions from way back when.
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What will be referenced from the sitcom, however, are sight gags involving the cone of silence and the shoe phone, and catch phrases “Right, Chief” and “Would you believe...?” As a nod to Feldon’s 99, Hathaway says she even sports a bob haircut in some scenes, and occasionally utters dialogue in that demure and breathless Feldon way.
Other than that, she just tried to do what director Peter Segal (Anger Management) told her to do, understanding hardcore fans will always second-guess.
“I learned on Ella Enchanted you will never make everyone happy,” says Hathaway in a recent Manhattan interview. She’s referring to one of her rare bombs, which was based on a popular teen novel. “Even if you make a cute movie based on a beloved person, or a beloved book, or a beloved TV series, anything beloved, you will never be able to make everyone happy.”
All she knows for sure is that she has the backing of the original Get Smart creative folks, and that counts in large amounts. “When I got Get Smart I just really wanted to hear Mel Brooks, Leonard Stern and Barbara Feldon approved of my casting and they all did,” she says. “Once I had that in my back pocket, I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’”
Unfortunately, Hathaway wasn’t quite prepared to work with Steve Carell, famous for his 40-Year-Old Virgin ad libs and Second City improvisational skills. She should’ve seen it coming, but she didn’t.
“I lost it on camera a lot with him,” she confesses. “I ruined a really great take once. So then the pressure was on for me. I never wanted to do that again.”
In response, Carell did everything he could to make Hathaway laugh during a scene. “I started to work on deep breathing,” she recalls. “And I found biting the inside of my lip helped. And many times below frame I was pinching my wrist — but I mean anything to distract me.”
On the plus side, Hathaway got to watch Carell suffer the same fate.
“I’ll tell you something lovely,” she happily reports. “You know who Steve can’t keep a straight face around? Alan Arkin. We did a scene and Alan had us all in stitches, but especially Steve.”
One sequence between Carell and Arkin was particularly harrowing for Carell. “He kept screwing up take after take,” she adds, “and it was wonderful.”
Apparently there are some situations for which even the best arts training can’t prepare you, and Hathaway does have credentials. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she was an accomplished singer and performer as a child and later was the only teenager accepted into New York’s Barrow Group Theater Company’s acting program. As a soprano, she performed as a finalist at the All Eastern U.S. High School Honors Chorus at Carnegie Hall.
In 1998, when she was just 16, she landed her first big role, starring in the Fox TV series Get Real. But when the show was cancelled after one season Hathaway enrolled at Vassar College. She was still at Vassar when, at 19, she was catapulted to stardom with the release of The Princess Diaries, but she proceeded cautiously and admits she had her disappointments. She missed out on the Christine role in 2004’s The Phantom of the Opera and turned down the female lead in Knocked Up, last year’s big surprise hit.
And boyfriends? She refuses to make a big deal of her love life, despite the fact that she’s often photographed next to her partner since 2004, Raffaello Follieri, an Italian-born real estate developer. In general, though, she feels it best to keep personal things personal. “I’m a private person and one of my mantras in life is from the brilliant Mr. Oscar Wilde,” says Hathaway. “He says ‘The less said about life’s sores, the better.’”
The turn of phrase she uses to describe her own skills in the human-nature department is slightly less eloquent. “I have a finely tuned bullshit detector,” she says, adding, “And I’m not someone that trusts very easily, so I keep the majority of myself closed off from most people until I know them well enough.”
Not that she’s complaining about her popularity, even if it’s not exactly what she expected when she first dreamt of acting so many years ago. “I don’t believe in all that malarkey that it’s the exposed life you’ve chosen,” she says. “When I grew up, my understanding of being an actress didn’t include being a celebrity.”
Bob Thompson lives in Toronto where he writes about movies for the National Post.
The ’60s’ 99
Barbara Feldon, seen here with Don Adams, played Agent 99 in the 1960s TV series. After the show went off the air, Feldon largely made her living in TV movies, doing voiceover work and making guest appearances on sitcoms like McMillan & Wife, Cheers and Mad About You. In the latter, she poked fun at herself playing Diane Caldwell, a difficult actress best known for her TV persona “Spy Girl.”