Speaking on her five-year long journey in sobriety, Anne Hathaway gets real on The New York Times podcast The Interview. Hathaway, an Oscar-winner, mother of two and Princess of Genovia (in my heart), discusses the importance of her personal milestone and her decision to go sober.
“There are so many other things I identify as milestones,” Hathaway, 41, says. “I don’t normally talk about it, but I am over five years sober. That feels like a milestone to me. 40 feels like a gift.”
Hathaway stopped drinking in 2019, sharing her decision on the Ellen Degeneres Show. “I’m gonna stop drinking while my son’s living in my house. I don’t totally love the way I [drink] and he’s getting to an age where he really does need me all the time in the mornings,” she explains. Later, she said the tipping point was when dropping her son off from school. “I was hungover and that was enough for me. I didn’t love that one.”
In conversation with Vanity Fair, Hathaway explained that she sees her relationship with alcohol like an allergy. And once she started avoiding it, her life got better.
“If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it,” she says. “My personal experience with it is that everything is better,” she says. “For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow…I make a lot of my lifestyle choices in service of supporting mental health. I stopped participating in things that I know to be draining or can cause spirals.”
In the ranging interview with The New York Times, it’s clear that making those choices has had a huge impact on who Hathaway is now. She’s having more fun being herself than ever before, and it shows. She is quick to correct interviewer David Marchese when he calls her a people pleaser from New Jersey.
“I’m a former people pleaser from New Jersey,” she says proudly.