Anne Hathaway Explains Going MIA After Oscar: "My Impression Is People Needed a Break From Me"

At Sundance to promote Song One, star explains to Huffington Post why she kept a relatively low profile last year after awards seaseon

By Natalie Finn Jan 22, 2014 11:25 PMTags
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Paparazzi being as vigilant as they are, sometimes we don't notice when one of the movie stars we see all the time in magazines and online goes missing from an actual screen.

But now that we think about it, Anne Hathaway did go relatively MIA following her triumphant 2013 awards season—and now we know why!

"My impression is that people needed a break from me," she said (reportedly with a laugh) in a new interview with the Huffington Post.

While her profile could only be so low following her Golden Globe, SAG and Oscar winners for Les Misérables, she did pop up on the big screen only once during the rest of the year, in a cameo in Joseph Gordon-Levitt's indie romance Don John.

But after a romantic trip to Hawaii with hubby Adam Shulman to kick off the new year, Hathaway is back in action with a vengeance, with no less than three films in the release pipeline for 2014. (And four if you count her voicing a character in the animated Rio 2.)

She's currently at the Sundance Film Festival to promote her latest movie, Song One, which she also produced with Shulman.

Jason Merritt/Getty Images for Grey Goose

But while she plays a woman who falls for her injured musician brother's rock-star idol, Hathaway says that the notion that this is yet another musical tour de force role for her is a "misconception."

"And it's a very different film than [Les Mis], but I don't play a singer or a musician—I play an anthropologist," she clarified to HuffPost. "So, I don't think it would have felt organic at all if all of a sudden [her character] Franny had this secretly honed talent. So, it was fun to get to sing and to find a place in my voice that it sounded like it was untrained and tentative and shy. But, I thought, you know, she comes from a musical family so she probably has a nice voice, but just isn't a singer."

But she does sing in the movie, so you know.

Hathaway also said that she didn't exactly mean to do a small film after being in two huge blockbusters, Les Mis and The Dark Knight Rises.

"I think there's a common misconception about actors—that we have a lot more control than we do about when things happen. We met on [Song One] in 2011—I was working on Batman—and then we developed this script and the music for two years, then we shot it in June. And we had been planning on shooting in the fall and then Chris Nolan called with an offer for a part in his new movie."

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Nolan's Interstellar is due out later this year.

"So, we [the Song One team] would either have to wait and push until after [Interstellar]— which nobody wanted to do—or move it up and have a truncated pre-production, which is what wound up happening. It didn't have anything to do with Oscars or anything like that, it was always the story that I believed in."

And before anyone complains, Hathaway clarified: "I am not complaining about how it's working out."