Anne Hathaway Celebrates Five Glorious Years of Sobriety
Anne Hathaway is a private person. You know that. I know that. Hey, even her kids know that. After all, they’re kept in the dark about what she does for a living.
But the Hollywood star is learning to open up and we couldn’t be more proud of her.
“I don’t normally talk about it, but I am over five years sober,” she shared in an interview with the New York Times.
“It feels a little too exposed to discuss the alienation I felt from my body, but there was a lot of somatic stress there,” the 41-year-old said. “I was very in my head about a lot of things.”
The Devil Wears Prada star also admitted that drinking was “probably” her way of dealing with not knowing “how to breathe” yet.
The star discussed her decision to cut alcohol from her life in an interview with Vanity Fair, published last month. “I knew deep down it wasn’t for me,” she said.
“And it just felt so extreme to have to say, ‘But none?’ But none.”
“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 continued.
So far, it’s been great for the Princess Diaries star. “My personal experience with it is that everything is better,” she said. “For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow,” Hathaway explained.
In January 2019, the actress revealed the moment she decided to give up alcohol on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Hathaway recalled making the big decision when it began interfering with her ability to be there for her kids.
“I did one school run one day where I dropped him [Jonathan] off at school, I wasn’t driving, but I was hungover,” she confessed.
“That was enough for me. I didn’t love that one,” the star continued.
“I quit drinking back in October,” she said. Hathaway added that she’s committed to staying the course “while my son is in my house just because I don’t totally love the way I do it, and he’s getting to an age where he really does need me all the time in the mornings.”
“I don’t think drinking is bad. It’s just the way I do it—which I personally think is really fun and awesome—is just not the kind of fun and awesome that goes with having a child for me,” she elaborated.
During the same interview, Hathaway also mentioned “our cultural fixation” on turning 40 and how her life has felt since celebrating her 40th birthday. “I don’t take it that seriously. There are so many other things I identify as milestones,” the Oscar winner shared.
She then added that her sobriety “feels like a milestone” and that, “Forty feels like a gift.”
She continued, “The fact of the matter is I hesitate at calling things ‘middle age’ simply because I can be a semantic stickler and I could get hit by a car later today.”
“We don’t know if this is middle age. We don’t know anything,” the star concluded.
Her new movie, The Idea of You, is an adaptation of Robinne Lee’s romance novel of the same name. It chronicles an unexpected love affair between a 40-year-old divorcée and a 24-year-old lead singer of a boy band. It celebrates defying societal expectations and making decisions with a stronger sense of self.
