Anne Hathaway is one of four Elle covers for the female stars of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Hathaway plays Penelope, Odyssess’s long-suffering wife, who waits twenty years for her husband to return from the Trojan War. This interview was conducted before The Devil Wears Prada 2 came out, btw. Anne is speaking from a place where she doesn’t even know that Devil/Prada is about to become one of the biggest films of the year. I’m guessing that The Odyssey will be another major film of the year. Everything’s coming up Annie! Some highlights from Anne’s Elle interview:

Her sons: These days, Hathaway can’t help but smile when she thinks about where she is in life. Her sons, ages 6 and 10, are “in this really fun zone where we all love hanging out together, which I understand may change,” she says. “Well, we will always love hanging out with them, but their feelings about us might change,” she clarifies, laughing. “So for the moment, we’re all just in it. Adam and I are soaking it up. I’m having the most wonderful time with my family, living in the city of my dreams, and work seems to be going really, really well. So rather obnoxiously, I’m having a great time as everything else burns.”

Bread and roses: “There’s that famous phrase: ‘We need our bread, but we need our roses, too.’ And I would be so sad without them. Life asks so much of everyone to just stay in it. Why would we work so hard if not to experience joy, if not to contribute to beauty or experience beauty? I think you have to learn how to hold all these things simultaneously.”

Christopher Nolan on working with Hathaway for the third time: “There’s a maturity to her performances now. It’s not that something was missing before, it’s just it’s developed, as moving through life develops us all. Her work has a sense of quiet calm to it that’s really remarkable.” And despite her veteran status, he says, Hathaway is always looking to challenge herself. “She’s never satisfied with what she’s done in the past, or what she’s doing in the moment. She’s always striving for something just beyond her grasp.”

Penelope’s rawness: “We think about Penelope as a model of patience. But I was interested in the raw edge of her. I was interested in the fury, the emotion, and the passion that she would have had to ride for him for those 20 years. In a time when so many marriages were made for political convenience, the two of them chose each other, and they understood what they had and that not everybody gets that,” Hathaway says. It helps that she finds herself in such a partnership offscreen. “My whole thing about marriage is…it’s such a big deal to share your life with someone. You know? Because it’s yours. It’s fully yours to do anything you want with. And so to find someone who inspires you to say, ‘As great as this is on my own, sharing it with you feels like it could lead to somewhere even better.’ I imagine that actually is rare, and I do feel like I found that and I don’t take it for granted.”

Facelift rumors: The night before our interview, she shared a video on her Instagram, showing off the trick her hairstylist uses to give her face a little extra lift (two small braids near each temple that are pulled back and pinned). The trick works so well for her that rumors have swirled in recent months that Hathaway has had a facelift. I tell her it seems like posting the video was a pointed denial. “I wouldn’t say pointed. But we’re at a time when people feel very confident in assuming what they think is fact, and sometimes what they think is accurate and sometimes it’s not,” she says diplomatically. “My preference would be to never comment on anything and to just live in the mystery and not draw attention to myself, but the speculation has gotten so loud that you do feel the need to just get your truth out there. And I’ll probably always wonder, ‘Should I have posted that or not? Should I have just kept going and done the thing that makes me happy and makes me feel more confident on the red carpet?’ But I felt like the conversation was becoming distracting. Also, by the way, these are huge medical decisions that people are presuming.I wanted to show that like, no, I didn’t make a huge medical decision. It’s just two braids…And by the way, the other thing about all this is, I might still get a facelift someday.”

She’s gentler with herself: “To have worked so hard in my life to have…sorry, I do get emotional thinking about it,” she says, her eyes welling with tears, “to have become a more positive person, to have become a healthier person, to have become a safer person, I was really happy that I could share that with people who were so formative and responsible for so many of the beautiful things that I have in my life.”

[From Elle]

I never thought Anne had a facelift, but it’s hard to deny that she’s been getting Botox. Nothing too excessive, but you can see in The Odyssey clips and in red carpet videos that some of her face is frozen. I think she’s doing what Robin Wright used to say – “sprinkles of Botox.” I’m not saying that to be unkind, it’s just a fact of life and many actresses consider Botox and fillers to be regular maintenance at this point. Also: Penelope and Odysseus’s marriage wasn’t great! It’s not like it’s some historically strong marriage.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid and Avalon Red, cover courtesy of Elle.