ANNE HATHAWAY Shining Bright

The Oscar winner talks acting, activism and getting advice

- CLAIRE ISAAC & SARA TAPIA

She had her second son Jack in November last year, but already Anne Hathaway has picked a juicy – and appropriately political – role for her return to the big screen.

In Dark Waters, the 37-year-old actress plays real-life whistleblower Sarah Bilott, whose husband (played by Mark Ruffalo), helped expose environmental contamination by chemical company DuPont in the United States.

‘It’s heartbreaking and infuriating on a human level,’ the mum-of-two says of the true story. ‘There wasn’t really any acting required, in terms of playing someone who was learning of corruption and was equal parts aghast and terrified and angry and emotional.’

Anne is no stranger to politics. The actress is already a sexual harassment activist and vocal member of the #MeToo movement, and thanks her parents for her political leanings.

‘I was born in the early ’80s, and there were still things I was told I couldn’t do because I was a girl,’ she says of her younger years. ‘I was really lucky I was raised in a household where that sentence was never uttered.’

GOING GREEN

Anne is also an environmental activist – she is trying to make all her movie sets zero waste. She says the film industry is ‘one of the worst polluters on the planet’ and wants things to start changing.