The theater employees are asking us to leave but we are simply too seated for the upcoming A24 pop musical starring Anne Hathaway, Mother Mary. Hathaway’s next diva moment features songs by three of the hottest hitmakers of the day—Jack Antonoff, FKA Twigs and Charli XCX—and is already generating plenty of buzz and a little controversy (yes, Christians are in the comments calling it blasphemous due to, we guess, the title?).
Apparently the shoot itself was no picnic. Director David Lowery (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, The Green Knight) compared the process to the making of Apocalypse Now, one of the most notoriously troubled productions in Hollywood history. “At one point Annie broke down and said, ‘I have to apologize, because I think what’s going to come out of me will hurt you.’ And [costar] Michaela [Coel] took her hands and said, ‘I love you, I trust you’…. We were in various stages of that for about a week, shooting that scene,” he told Vogue, per Variety. Uh, sounds rough.
“What struck me right away, reading the script, is that you can’t ‘perform’ Mother Mary,” Hathaway herself told Vogue. Already a gifted singer, she took additional vocal and dance training to become the pop diva at the center of the story. “If I got the part, I would have to become material David could craft with…I had to submit to being a beginner. The humility of that—showing up every day knowing you’re going to suck. And it has to be okay. You’re not ‘bad.’ You’re just a beginner. Getting to that mindset—I had to shed some things that were hard to shed. It was welcome. But it was hard, the way transformational experiences can be hard.”
We won’t know if it was worth it until the movie comes out, but in the meantime, here’s everything we do know…
What is the plot of Mother Mary?
“[The film] follows the relationship between a fictional musician and a famous fashion designer,” reads Mother Mary’s IMDb page. A Variety article notes that Hathaway’s character “flees her tour during an existential crisis and seeks out the old friend who helped craft her public persona,” presumably played by Michaela Coel of I May Destroy You.
Read the full article here
