Anne Hathaway covers the latest issue of Harper’s Bazaar, mostly to promote her latest film Mother Mary. I honestly think Mother Mary looks and sounds kind of awful, but I’m fine with Anne doing more experimental, woman-driven films (it’s directed by a man, but you get the idea). People just want to talk about The Devil Wears Prada 2, and she teases it a bit in this piece. I’m finally learning why Andy Sachs has returned to Runway after all of this time – Andy comes in as Runway’s newly-hired features editor. That makes sense. You can read the full Bazaar piece here, and here are some highlights:

Life on the wagon: She tells me about having made a “conscious shift” in recent years to stop living her life as a “stressed person,” which coincided with her decision to stop drinking. “Before, there was this focus that was really uncompromising and uninterrupted. And I just can’t tell you anymore what life is like without kids, but kids interrupt you all the time.” Balance, she explains, is too fragile a concept. “My friends and I talk about it a lot, and we actually feel very defeated by the concept of balance. If the weight shifts in one direction, you then have to bounce it up on the other side, and we find that it winds us up as opposed to making us steady. We’re like, ‘We seek to harmonize our life.’”

Paparazzi swarmed the ‘Prada 2’ shoot: During one scene, Hathaway took a spill down some steps after a heel snapped. “I was aware that I was falling, I was aware that I was being photographed, and I was also aware that, like, so many people on the crew, their hearts had just jumped up into their throat, so I needed to get up quickly to make sure they knew I was okay,” she recalls. She jumped up immediately after, with her arms outstretched like a gymnast finishing a routine, to let everyone know she was okay.

She knew early on that she wasn’t cut out for pop stardom: “I just remember having that conversation with myself and being like, ‘Okay, well, I don’t think you’ll ever be a dancer, and your singing’s fine, but I don’t know that you’re ever going to be a star vocalist.’ So, I ruled out ‘pop star’ pretty early, but I found that acting kept opening to me.” She adds, “I wasn’t concerned that I couldn’t keep up with Beyoncé, because she is Beyoncé.”

For ‘Mother Mary’ she actually had to try to be a pop star: “It was really, really humbling to have to deal with the limitations that my body had always had, that I’d accepted as part of my identity, but now they were no longer acceptable.”

Anne will always be a hard worker: “I think I just knew from a young age that although I’m really lucky in so many ways and grew up with certain privileges, there wasn’t, like, this big life that was just going to be handed to me. I’ve always just felt defined by my work ethic, because my skill set is what it is and I have to work with what I have, but how hard I can work is something that I can control. And so I never want to pull up short and feel like I could have worked harder. If I know that I’m working hard, I can live with who I am.”

People feel like they’ve grown up with her: “I feel like I was, like, everybody’s babysitter. And I was a child when I made The Princess Diaries. I was still a 22-year-old mess of a human when I made The Devil Wears Prada. And so, we’ve grown up together, and I’m so happy for them and how their lives are unfolding. Like, this crazy thing where people just graduate from high school and they just send me their graduation announcements. People send me their wedding invitations. It’s so very sweet. And I feel bad, because I can never do anything with them, because I’m not Taylor Swift–level organized. Maybe someday.”

She has to embrace her power, stardom & stress: “You can’t have a good time at a party if the hostess is stressed or she’s letting her stress show. I just decided that it wasn’t fair for me to move through my life as a stressed person. I don’t want my kids to be around it, I don’t want my friends to be around it, I don’t want strangers to be around it, I don’t want people I work with to be around it. So I’ve done a lot of work to figure out how to metabolize differently, so that way I don’t feel overwhelmed by all that’s coming at me and that I’m participating in, but I actually feel really excited by it.”

Whether she’s still that ‘cringe’ woman: “I’m a human being, but I think it’s important to … there has been a change.” She credits part of this change to her decision to stop drinking several years ago. (“It all just works better for me without it.”) But there’s also a change that comes with age. “I think that very often, conversations about aging presume that the first part of life is the happiest and the most fulfilling, and I don’t necessarily think that’s true. I wasn’t expecting to find another gear at 40.”

[From Harper’s Bazaar]

This profile is heavily engineered through the lens of “Anne is an elder Millennial icon and she was not immune to Millennial cultural trends.” The biggest argument for that is probably the “cringe” thing – Anne was “cringe” in her 20s and early 30s, cringe like a theater-camp kid. For Gen Z, cringe is worse than death. For Millennials, cringe is a phase they outgrew or sometimes still embrace. I think Anne will always have that sort of hyper earnest, dedicated, type-A personality, but she has been trying to loosen up a bit in recent years. Also: it’s sweet that people send wedding invitations to her.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid. Cover courtesy of Harper’s Bazaar.