Anne Hathaway on Being Inspired by Beyoncé’s ‘Homecoming’ for ‘Mother Mary’ (Exclusive)

Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, and writer/director David Lowery are dishing on their new film “Mother Mary.” 

“Extra’s” Mona Kosar Abdi spoke with the trio bout the psychological drama-thriller, which centers on a pop star reuniting with her estranged best friend.

Anne plays the pop star character, taking some inspiration from Beyoncé.

She shared, “I watched ‘Homecoming’ so much. That was amazing to just to see her work ethic and just to know that even though she’s been Beyoncé since birth and has been training and developing her artistry for so long, she still puts in that much effort. It was really inspiring for me to just go like, ‘Okay, even if you’re not Beyoncé, and I’m not Beyoncé, you can still try to work as hard as her.’”

Anne has spent her adult life in the public eye, and spoke about drawing from her own experiences with fame.

She answered, “In terms of my own life, my own experience, I think that I saw so much of ‘Mother Mary’ as a cautionary tale for something that I’ve really tried to stay away from, which is it’s always been a great fear of mine that you might, at some point, lose the plot on where the person is and where the person ends, where the persona begins. And if you lose that, what happens if you let the persona take over? And if the persona takes over, what happens if something goes wrong? Because then it’s just a freefall underneath it because there’s nothing really there to catch you.”

“‘Mother Mary’ is kind of like my worst nightmare,” Anne admitted with a laugh.

In the film, Anne had to perform in front of hundreds of people.

David pointed out, “It’s immediately humbling when you realize 400 people is just the front row of a concert, and you’re like, ‘Oh, goodness… A space like this just absorbs everyone.’”

While Anne sang for the film, she said she's not planning to tour the soundtrack anytime soon!

She explained, “Now that I know how much work it was to just be able to do it, like, kind of with the safety net of a film, which could be edited and we could pick our best takes and all those things, I don’t think I could stop my life long enough to put in the work necessary to take it on.”

Michaela recalled she and Anne being a “blubbering mess” at their first read-through.

Of their chemistry, she said, “Anne and I are in the flow right now. We’ve connected… Honestly, I just go back to the first time we ever read the script… We walked into a room, neither of us had met one another, and we read. We were there, and again, it’s credited to David’s writing, it throws you into chemistry without your consent.”

David used pop music to center the film, saying, “There’s something about the expressiveness of pop music, in particular. I grew up listening to rock’n’roll, Nine Inch Nails, but pop music specifically has a way of taking one’s worst day and turning it into something you can dance to. The New York Times coined the term ‘The Sad Banger’ and I love a sad banger. I wanted to make a movie that encapsulated everything I feel when I hear a sad banger.”