It was the year 2016 when Sony announced that a movie about the iconic Barbie doll was in the making. The star chosen to lead the film, to many’s dislike, was Amy Schumer; Barbie was going to be kicked out of Barbieland for not being perfect enough… and that was pretty much all we knew back then.
One year later, news came that Amy Schumer was leaving the project out of schedule conflicts, although she recently revealed she wasn’t happy with the story (although she worked on the script) and that Sony would not let her change more of it. So, who was chosen to bring the imperfect Barbie to the real world? None other than the actually perfect Anne Hathaway.
Anne Hathaway’s Barbie was scheduled to be released in the Summer of 2018, and it was going to be directed by the famous comedy filmmaker Alethea Jones. Hathaway even hinted at us with some astonishing pink outfits, and we were all extremely excited… Sadly, or maybe a blessing in disguise, Anne’s Barbie dream was cut short.
Fortunately, years later, Margot Robbie took the reins of the project, and the rest is history. Still, the idea of Anne Hathaway playing our favorite doll kept us wondering how amazing it would’ve been! Anne Hathaway has answers for us.
What Does Anne Hathaway Think About Margot Robbie’s Barbie
In an interview in the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Anne Hathaway was questioned about the Barbie project and her feelings about it, especially if she liked the course Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig took that made it such an iconic movie. “What’s so exciting about what Greta and Margot and that phenomenal team [did] is they hit a bullseye. The bullseye caused the entire world to reach this level of ecstasy. Now imagine that version … that much energy, that much anticipation, that much emotion … but it’s not the right version. I actually think of it as a lucky thing it didn’t get made.”
Besides the creative decisions in terms of story and production in which Margot Robbie also participated, Anne had some comments on her acting work: “Margot is sublime. What she is doing as a creative person and a producer is so exciting and inspiring. Just as a cinemagoer and as a woman in Hollywood since I was a kid, I’m thrilled by the development. If I believed that the version I was attached to could have done that, I might feel differently about it, but I genuinely think their film was the best possible version. It’s easy just to be thrilled and happy for them. I love watching women kill it. To do so well, so undeniably that they actually had to write new records … come on! I think it will probably make things better.”
Letting go of a character that will likely take you to the peak of stardom must not be easy. Barbie had all the potential of getting millions to the movie theater, but it needed the right story and the right person to make it good and iconic, just as Margot and Greta did. On that matter, Anne Hathaway said that in this industry you have to “learn to just go… the right role finds the right person, and sometimes it’s you and sometimes not.”
Barbie wasn’t the only great role she had to let go, as she later revealed. She had been asked to join Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man universe for the fourth installment where she was going to play Black Cat. Eventually, Sony decided not to go with the film and rebooted the entire series with Andrew Garfield’s The Amazing Spider-Man. As we know, these movies didn’t work the way they expected.
For Hathaway, there’s always a reason for things to happen, as she believes that not making the Spider-Man movie allowed her to play a bigger role, that of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises. Had she been occupied with Raimi’s movie, Christopher Nolan might not have given her a call for his iconic Batman saga.
At the end of the day, what makes Anne Hathaway the perfect Barbie is that she understands that their universe, Barbieland, is all about female empowerment and feminism; that is sorority. The way she talks about Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig’s film shows that she’s the perfect citizen of Barbieland.
