Directed by William Oldroyd Aileen just last night it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and Anne Hathaway, who stars in the film alongside Thomasin McKenzie, took the opportunity to talk about how the film ties in with the terrifying experience she had when she first started out. acting as a teenager.
As reported Variety, during a Q&A after the screening, Hathaway shared this story. “I just remembered one of the first questions I was ever asked when I started acting and had to deal with the press was: Hathaway says she was 16 at the time, which presumably means it was in the early days of her one-season run on Fox. Get real (Hathaway and Jesse Eisenberg’s screen debuts), and Hathaway says her “16-year-old self wanted to respond with this film.”
Hathaway has been discussed before how is the script Aileen, based on Otessa Moshfegh’s book of the same name, influenced him, saying: “I had to sit down with this one. I had to go back to it. I had to get away from it. It kept revealing itself to me.” Hathaway also said at Sundance that she was drawn to the project because she wanted to work with Oldroyd, saying that her film Lady Macbeth (featuring Florence Pugh in her breakthrough role) was an “extraordinary piece of work” and an “exploration of feminine complexities” that struck her “really, really deeply”.
Aileen stars McKenzie (doing what is obviously an impressive Massachusetts accent if Variety believable) as a prison secretary who breaks out of her grim mundane existence when she develops a relationship with a psychologist (Hathaway) that eventually takes a dark turn. Aileen doesn’t have a distributor yet, but… that’s why you take a movie to Sundance.
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