One of Anne Hathaway’s Best Performances Is Only 30 Minutes Long
Isabella Soares is a Senior Writer for Collider, as well as a CherryPicks-approved critic.
Born in Brazil, previously based in Canada, and now residing in the UK, she is passionate about stories that revolve around culture, womanhood, and coming-of-age dynamics.
In her spare time, she enjoys watching nostalgic shows like ‘One Tree Hill’ and hosts her own podcast called Coming-of-Screen. In it, she interviews actors, directors, and creatives about coming-of-age/multigenerational stories in media.
Anne Hathaway knows what it takes to play a romantic lead. From a clever writer in love with her best friend in One Day to a 40-year-old single mom falling for a young musician in The Idea of You, the actress has charisma to spare and successfully captivates audiences with film after film. When looking back at some of Hathaway's most notable performances within the romance genre, it's impossible to discount her shortest TV role to date.
In Modern Love, Prime Video's anthology series based on the New York Times column, Hathaway plays Lexi, an accomplished lawyer whose path to finding her soulmate doesn't come easily, given her struggles with bipolar disorder. The role might've lasted only 30 minutes, but it still manages to go down as one of Hathaway's best performances to date.
Who Does Anne Hathaway Play in 'Modern Love'?
Inspired by Terri Cheney's column "Take Me As I Am, Whoever I Am," Season 1, Episode 3 of Modern Love starts with Lexi at home in front of her computer, trying to find the right way to describe herself on a dating website. Instead of embracing clichés surrounding her career and looks, she opts to share about meeting a guy (Jeff, played by Gary Carr) at a supermarket and how their brief fling leads her to find the strength to come out as bipolar.
At the beginning of the episode, Hathaway's character exudes joy, wearing a night-out outfit during the day simply because she wants her look to match her high spirits. When she chats with Jeff near the fruit aisle, she is beaming with energy, which instantly captivates him and leads him to invite her out for coffee. When Lexi leaves their coffee date and arrives at the law firm, she is still just as excited about work as she was about her supermarket outing. Given her demeanor, it's hard for anyone to imagine that Hathaway's character could ever be depressed. Yet, that is far from the case once she arrives home.
Anne Hathaway Delivers an Impressive Acting Showcase in a 30-Minute Episode
Throughout Hathaway's onscreen career, she's had the chance to deliver several emotional scenes (especially in her Oscar-winning performance in Les Misérables), but rarely has she had to showcase such an intense range in a matter of minutes. As Lexi, Hathaway portrays both the utter excitement that comes when a person with bipolar disorder is having a good day and the excruciating sadness that drives them to stay in bed for days on end. From smiling and wearing an eye-catching outfit to changing into sweatpants and lying under the covers, it's painful to see the character dealing with these mood swings daily.
When Jeff shows up at Lexi's doorstep for their second date, she is the opposite of thrilled — not because she wants to sabotage their night together, but because she is just too sad to be good company. Clueless about her condition, Jeff feels he wasted his time hanging out with her since she wasn't happy or wanted to engage in conversation. At the end of their second outing, it's clear that Lexi's depressive state drove him away, like most men she'd met prior.
Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes Which Iconic Romance Is Your Favorite? Harry & Sally · Love & Basketball · Heated Rivalry · Titanic
Four great love stories, and four completely different ideas of what love actually is. One is a friendship that took twelve years to admit itself. One is two people who refuse to stop competing. One happens entirely behind closed doors. And one lasts five days and never stops mattering. Eight questions decide which one is really yours.
🍂Harry & Sally(1989)
🏀Love & Basketball(2000)
🏒Heated Rivalry(HBO Max)
🚢Titanic(1997)
01
How does your love story start? The first scene tells you what kind of story this is going to be.
02
What do the two of you keep arguing about? Every great romance has one fight it has over and over.
03
How do you show somebody that you love them? Grand gestures are easy to write. This is the harder question.
04
What is actually standing in the way? There is always something. Which something tells you the genre.
05
Which romantic moment gets you every single time? Be honest. There is one that works on you and you know which.
06
What would you actually risk for the right person? Every romance asks this. Most people find out far too late.
07
Where are the two of you in ten years? Some love stories are about the meeting. Some are about the staying.
08
Which of these sounds most like something you would say? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your romance.
Roll The Credits Your Romance Is…
Four love stories, four completely different ideas of what it means to be somebody's person. This is the one that matches how you actually fall, and what it would ask of you.
Harry & Sally
You do not fall for strangers. You fall for the person you have already been talking to for years, which is the slowest and by some distance the most durable way anybody has found to do this.
- When Harry Met Sally made the case that the best romance is an argument you enjoy, conducted over a decade, by two people refusing to admit what is happening.
- You want to be known rather than swept away. Somebody who remembers your worst story is doing better work than anybody arriving with flowers.
- The film is unusually honest about timing. These two are wrong for each other repeatedly until suddenly they are not, and neither of them engineered it.
- You would still be talking about everything at eighty. That is the entire promise.
Love & Basketball
You want a partner, not an audience. Somebody who wants their own life as badly as you want yours, and who would never ask you to be smaller to make the relationship easier.
- This is the rare romance where both people have a real career and the film takes both of them equally seriously.
- You would rather be pushed than protected. The right person for you is also a bit of a rival, and that never entirely goes away.
- It understands the actual problem in ambitious relationships. Not whether you love each other, but whose turn it is this year.
- You would still be competing at forty. That is how you would know it was working.
Heated Rivalry
The intensity was never the problem. The secrecy is. You are drawn to a love that lives entirely in private, and to the particular ache of wanting somebody you are not supposed to want.
- Heated Rivalry runs on the oldest engine in romance: two people on opposite sides, meeting in secret, getting far more attached than either of them planned.
- You keep your private life genuinely private, and something in you finds hidden things more real than public ones.
- The tension is not only between the two of them. It is between what they have and what it would cost either one to say it out loud.
- Years of this, and the whole story is really about whether either of them will finally stop hiding.
Titanic
You do not do this cautiously. When it happens for you it is immediate and total and it rearranges everything, and you would not accept a smaller version of it.
- Titanic gave us the biggest romance in film history and then made it last about five days, which is precisely the point of it.
- You measure love by intensity rather than duration. A few days of the real thing beats decades of something merely comfortable.
- The film is not only about the romance. It is about a woman who went on to live an enormous life afterwards because of it.
- You would still be telling this story at a hundred years old, and telling it exactly the same way.
A few days later, Lexi is in high spirits again, committed to calling Jeff and making amends for their disastrous date. Her excitement convinces him to give her a second chance, agreeing to eat at her place later that night. Just as joyful as the start of the episode, she cleans her apartment, doubles her productivity throughout the day, and dresses to impress on her third date with Jeff. As she is about to finish up her makeup in the bathroom, Lexi instantly resorts to a depressed state and, despite trying to fight back her emotions, she falls to the ground and cries while her love interest knocks on the door.
Anne Hathaway Exceptionally Portrays the Nuances of Bipolar Disorder
Lexi isn't an easy character to portray onscreen, especially for a half-hour span. Yet, Hathaway is able to tackle the nuances tied to this role exceptionally, embodying the struggles that several women face on their journeys with bipolar disorder. In an interview with Glamour in 2019, Cheney praised the actress for playing her and not glossing over her condition:
“Mania is often charming, but depression is another story. It’s sometimes an off-putting experience and very hard to describe or portray. Anne captured it in a way that not only showed its anguish, but also moved the viewer to empathy.”
The scene that best illustrates Hathaway's performance moving viewers to empathy is the episode's closing scene, in which Lexi shares her mental health hardships with a co-worker. This moment is significant on its own because the character has never opened up about her bipolar diagnosis with anyone else in her life. Fearful of rejection, she shielded everyone around her from the truth, and it affects all the relationships in her life.
When Lexi finally tells her colleague what is really going on every time she doesn't show up at work, she is suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of freedom to be herself. This interaction leads her to finally embrace bipolar disorder as part of who she is, and this benefits her life in countless ways. As she finishes writing her dating profile, it's clear she wants her next love interest to be aware of her highs and lows before entering a relationship with her. The way Hathaway weaves her character's journey from start to finish, from being overburdened by mood swings to becoming a person who fully embraces bipolar disorder, makes her performance in Modern Love a highlight of her storied career.
Modern Love
- Release Date
- 2019 - 2020
- Network
- Amazon Prime Video
- Showrunner
- John Carney
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