Few performers could claim the type of year Anne Hathaway has enjoyed.
Across five major releases – Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2, The Odyssey, The End of Oak Street and Verity – the Academy Award winner has moved between wildly different characters and filmmakers, revisited one of the most beloved roles of her career, and helped Christopher Nolan turn one of literature’s oldest stories into one of the year’s biggest cinematic events.
With The Odyssey earning widespread critical acclaim and crossing the $1 billion mark at the global box office, it would be understandable if Hathaway wanted a moment to simply take stock of everything 2026 has brought her.
In fact, when discussing the speed with which she has moved between characters this year, Hathaway admitted there has been little opportunity to properly say goodbye to any of them.
“You just say thank you. I’m so glad we get to spend this time together,” she said, noting that there had been “no real time to have a process for it.”
For The Odyssey, Hathaway reunited with Nolan for the third time, following The Dark Knight Rises and Interstellar, to play Penelope, wife of Matt Damon’s Odysseus and mother to Tom Holland’s Telemachus. Nolan’s adaptation positions Ithaca as one half of its sprawling narrative, with Penelope and her son facing an increasingly dangerous occupation of their home as suitors attempt to force the queen to abandon hope of Odysseus returning and choose a new husband – and, by extension, a new king.
For Hathaway, however, Penelope was never simply the woman who waited.
“I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I think I’m entering a new chapter,” Hathaway said when reflecting on what playing the iconic character allowed her to explore. “It feels that way, like maybe that’s happening.”
Central to that discovery was something deceptively simple: Penelope did not apologise for the space she occupied.
“I felt no apology in her,” Hathaway explained. “Odysseus is the king of Ithaca during a time period where that was a very specific role that had a ton of power. But within their relationship she was very much his equal. And I think within the kingdom, she was a person of tremendous respect.”
That equality became essential to Hathaway’s interpretation. With Odysseus gone, Penelope is effectively left governing Ithaca while simultaneously protecting Telemachus and navigating the men who have invaded her home. Her power, therefore, has to operate within the limitations imposed upon a woman of her time.
“She’s always aware of the danger of stepping out too far, stepping over the line,” Hathaway said, particularly with the suitors surrounding her. But that awareness doesn’t translate into submission.
When Antinous enters Penelope’s chamber, for example, Hathaway noted that her character makes no attempt “to please him or charm him or be nice.”
“She’s kind of like, ‘Oh, you can get out of here. You’re not important to me.’”
It was an attitude Hathaway particularly relished being able to embody at this point in her own life.
“I liked being at an age where I could play a character like that, where she’s actually just on her own journey and focused on how she feels and not necessarily trying to smooth the road for other people,” she explained. “Normally when I play characters like that, they’re the bad guy, but she’s not. She’s not. She’s just sitting in her power such as it is.”
That power does not erase the qualities traditionally associated with Penelope. Patience and fidelity remain integral to her, but Hathaway came to view those characteristics as more complicated than simple demonstrations of devotion. They are also part of the armour Penelope has constructed to survive.
“Penelope is Odysseus’s equal in terms of strategy and cunning,” Hathaway said. “I thought about masks and I thought about the things that would allow her to live safely.”
Her patience and fidelity may be genuine, she added, but they can also function as “a weapon.” After two decades without her husband, Penelope is carrying far more frustration, anger and desire than the image of the eternally patient wife might suggest.
The love at the centre of that waiting was something Hathaway and Damon worked particularly hard to establish. Despite sharing comparatively little screen time, the two actors decided that Penelope and Odysseus had to feel not merely married, but extraordinarily fortunate to have found each other in a world where marriage was so often transactional.
“They are soulmates,” Hathaway said. “They love each other, they respect each other, they can’t get enough of each other.”
That happiness, she believed, only made their separation more painful.
“The people who understood best how rare a gift they had, they were the ones that would’ve felt the absence the most keenly,” she explained, adding that the distance may have actually “sharpened their love for each other.”
Her considerably more contemporary shorthand for Penelope proved even more evocative: “She’s just ride or die.”
Hathaway imagined the pair today as motorcycle enthusiasts. Penelope, importantly, would be entirely capable of handling her own bike; she would simply choose to ride with Odysseus.
Finding that version of Penelope initially required Hathaway to overcome the weight of playing a character whose cultural history stretches back almost 3,000 years. During her first days on set, she found herself mentally accounting for the centuries separating herself from the woman she was portraying.
Eventually, she realised she had to stop carrying that history into every movement.
“There’s something so universal about her,” Hathaway said. “There’s something so compelling about her. There’s something elemental about her.”
It was a role that also marked another milestone in Hathaway’s long creative relationship with Nolan. She first worked with the filmmaker on The Dark Knight Rises while in her 20s, returned for Interstellar in her 30s, and has now made The Odyssey in her 40s.
“I just feel like I’ve been so influenced by him at every stage,” she said.
Yet for all the scale associated with a Nolan production – The Odyssey was filmed across six countries and became his first feature shot entirely with IMAX film cameras – Hathaway’s strongest memories appear to be surprisingly intimate ones.
She compared the immersive nature of the production to Rachel Getting Married, the Jonathan Demme drama that earned Hathaway her first Academy Award nomination and which she had long considered the “artistic high water mark” of her career.
For years, Hathaway believed nothing would quite equal that experience.
Then came The Odyssey.
“Now I have two that reach those heights,” she said, crediting the production’s immersive environment, ensemble mentality and lack of hierarchy. “It was just across the board spectacular.”
Unlike the succession of characters she has had to hurriedly leave behind during this remarkably prolific year, The Odyssey appears unlikely to disappear quite so easily.
“I’m probably not going to really let it go,” Hathaway admitted. “I’m going to hold it because it’s a treasure.”
After a year encompassing five films, one billion-dollar epic and characters separated by centuries, perhaps Hathaway’s suggestion that she is entering a new chapter feels particularly apt.
And if Penelope is any indication of what that chapter looks like, it may be one defined less by transformation than assurance: characters who have nothing to prove, no need to make themselves smaller for those around them, and no apology for simply sitting in their power.
The Odyssey is currently screening in Australian theatres.
