Anne Hathaway said it was “lucky” that her Barbie film never got made, given that Greta Gerwig‘s movie “hit a bullseye.”
In 2017, it was revealed that the Eileen star was attached to Sony’s Barbie film after Amy Schumer dropped out of the project citing “scheduling conflicts” at the time. Though it was set for a May 2020 release date, with Alethea Jones directing, the movie never materialized.
This allowed for Margot Robbie’s production company, Lucky Chap, to come in and convince Warner Bros. to take on the movie, with Robbie starring and Gerwig directing.
Now, on a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Hathaway had nothing but praise for the record-breaking summer blockbuster that brought the famous doll to life.
“The thing that’s so exciting about what Margot and Greta and Ryan and America and that entire
phenomenal team [did] is they hit a bullseye,” the She Came to Me actress told host Josh Horowitz. “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. So I actually think of it as a lucky thing [the Sony movie didn’t get developed].”
Hathaway continued to share her admiration for Robbie and the impact the film had on so many, saying, “Margot is just sublime, period. What she is doing as a creative person and a producer is so exciting and inspiring. And the mythic giants they toppled with [Barbie] that have kept certain narratives in place that have not allowed opportunities to develop for so many people, they ran straight through it, dancing, sparkling!”
“Just as a cinema-goer and just as a woman in Hollywood since I was a kid, I’m thrilled by the development,” she added. “If I believed that the version I was attached to could have done that, yeah, I might feel differently about it, but I genuinely think their [film] was the best possible version. So it’s actually very easy to just be thrilled and happy [for them]. I’m also a person who loves watching women kill it. I just do, I just love it. And also, to do so well, so undeniably that they actually had to write new records, come on! … I think it’s probably going to make things better.”
Last year, Schumer revealed to The Hollywood Reporter that the reason she departed Sony’s Barbie movie was much more complicated than “scheduling conflicts,” as she cited prior. The project’s initial script portrayed a woman who slowly awakens to the fact that she doesn’t fit into the perfect world of Barbie Land and journeys to the real world, where she discovers that being unique is an asset.
“They definitely didn’t want to do it the way I wanted to do it, the only way I was interested in doing it,” the comedian-actress said, adding that she should have known just how far apart their visions were when the studio sent her a pair of Manolo Blahniks to celebrate. “The idea that that’s just what every woman must want, right there, I should have gone, ‘You’ve got the wrong gal.’”
As Hathaway looked back on her career as a whole, she noted elsewhere in the interview that she believes everything happens for a reason.
“You learn to just go, you know what, the right role finds the right person, and sometimes it’s you and sometimes it’s not,” the Oscar-winning actress explained. “When it doesn’t happen, just trust deeper and keep going. … It sounds maybe a little corny but you really do have to keep it grateful.”
