Anne Hathaway’s Pop Diva Meltdown: Behind the Glitter of 'Mother Mary'

Olivia Bennett, 12/3/2025Anne Hathaway's transformative role in 'Mother Mary' is a dazzling exploration of fame's complexities. With a captivating blend of emotional depth and pop spectacle, the film dives into the raw edges of friendship and celebrity culture, promising an unforgettable cinematic experience.

It’s Germany by way of international pop euphoria—a stage where every emotion finds its echo in a ravaged friendship and a wardrobe that could double as psychological armor. The setup tempts with melodrama, but always throws in some barbs just sharp enough to keep hands well clear of the velvet ropes. Hathaway, with her knack for swan-diving into roles that chew up Hollywood’s sense of comfort, now tackles Mary: an icon teetering at the knife’s edge of triumph and meltdown. Her old best friend, fashioned from creative wreckage, is right there in the fray—Michaela Coel as the designer with scars of her own, summoned to a barn that looks less like a filming location and more like an altar at which old gods of glamour come to weep.

One imagines Joan Crawford, pearl-clutching aside, slamming the martini right down and insisting she could have done it with half the emotional spillage. But times have changed, and David Lowery’s vision has a distinctly modern addiction to scale—what was meant as a chamber piece gallops quickly into opera. Lowery himself admits the ambition ballooned unexpectedly: “Just two actors, a simple room.” Famous last words. The next thing you know, you’re knee-deep in sequins and existential crises, stadiums howling, dreams unspooling.

And the settings? Lo-fi pastoral glamour, with candlelight flickering off couture that looks as if it whispered with ghosts. The barn transforms, scene by scene, into something holy and haunted—think less “Project Runway,” more the frothy tension of a friendship teetering on collapse, all stitched together in a fugue of memory and misunderstanding. There’s a pas de deux at work here—volatile, tender, inevitable—that the trailer all but dares you to look away from. No chance.

And because melodrama demands a soundtrack that aches as much as the story, the roster is less a playlist and more a clarion call: Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, FKA twigs—names that know how to twine euphoria and heartbreak around a shivering note. All the better for 2 a.m. bedroom sobbing, or so the consensus seems to be on pop Twitter (yes, they’re already dissecting the snippets, in case you wondered if the hype is for real).

Hathaway herself confesses to the sort of humility rarely glimpsed in scripted confessionals. Standing on that proverbial stage, she lets drop the armor: "Being a beginner, and being okay at being occasionally bad—that was the challenge.” There’s something strangely comforting about hearing the woman who once survived Fantine’s haircut and Miranda Priestly’s glare talking about learning to stumble, fall, get up, and shimmer anyway. Almost makes you wish more pop icons admitted to the bruises beneath the rhinestones.

Hunter Schafer—yes, she of the Botticelli-meets-Balenciaga school of red carpet myth-making—slides in as the assistant to Coel’s battered designer. A supporting role, perhaps, but it’s rumored that Schafer’s ethereal presence nearly derails the whole emotional gravity of the piece. “Mind-blown” is her verdict. If the young starlet fresh from the latest “Hunger Games” and HBO’s gritty corridors is still spinning, audiences may want to buckle their seatbelts come 2026.

Then again, what is any of this if not a spectacle of cost? “Mother Mary” isn’t another pop biopic that polishes every note until it gleams predictably. Beneath the neon and tulle is a meditation on how fame takes, costs, and sometimes—just sometimes—delivers that thing we’re all chasing: genuine connection, even if it’s chipped around the edges. There’s austerity in every ostentation, wildness in every whisper of silk, and just a hint of belligerence in the way the film stares down celebrity.

Visually, every shot in that trailer—stadiums roaring, candles guttering in the barn, Hathaway’s mascara threatening insurrection—drips with tension and decadence in equal measure. The glamour’s heady, bordering on feverish, and just unhinged enough to keep even the most jaded red carpet critic alert. It’s hard not to see the fingerprints of earlier masterpieces—“A Star Is Born,” “Velvet Goldmine”—but Lowery and his cast are after something twistier, more subversive. Here, stardom is both mask and mirror, and rarely wears either comfortably for long.

Somewhere in the crackle between spectacle and soul, “Mother Mary” seems to hit on a truth rarely named in glossy magazines: creative redemption looks different for everyone, and sometimes it comes at the cost of the thing that drew the crowd in the first place. Is the answer found in a daring couture dress? Maybe. Or maybe it’s the act of showing up, battered but radiant, for the final chorus.

For all the trailers, think pieces, and chatter flooding the timelines in 2025, one thing’s certain: when “Mother Mary” lands next April, it won’t just be about who’s watching. It’s about who’s willing to feel it, bruises and all. Sometimes, that’s about as glamorous as it gets.

There’s something electric in the air when a trailer manages to rattle Hollywood’s diamond-studded cage—not with pyrotechnics, but with the kind of controlled chaos only real risk-takers attempt. “Mother Mary,” the latest A24 spectacle, set off its share of reverberations the moment Anne Hathaway appeared, not as some celluloid ingenue or familiar face, but as a full-throttle pop deity with just as many fractures beneath the lacquer as diamonds in her stage crown.It’s Germany by way of international pop euphoria—a stage where every emotion finds its echo in a ravaged friendship and a wardrobe that could double as psychological armor. The setup tempts with melodrama, but always throws in some barbs just sharp enough to keep hands well clear of the velvet ropes. Hathaway, with her knack for swan-diving into roles that chew up Hollywood’s sense of comfort, now tackles Mary: an icon teetering at the knife’s edge of triumph and meltdown. Her old best friend, fashioned from creative wreckage, is right there in the fray—Michaela Coel as the designer with scars of her own, summoned to a barn that looks less like a filming location and more like an altar at which old gods of glamour come to weep.One imagines Joan Crawford, pearl-clutching aside, slamming the martini right down and insisting she could have done it with half the emotional spillage. But times have changed, and David Lowery’s vision has a distinctly modern addiction to scale—what was meant as a chamber piece gallops quickly into opera. Lowery himself admits the ambition ballooned unexpectedly: “Just two actors, a simple room.” Famous last words. The next thing you know, you’re knee-deep in sequins and existential crises, stadiums howling, dreams unspooling.And the settings? Lo-fi pastoral glamour, with candlelight flickering off couture that looks as if it whispered with ghosts. The barn transforms, scene by scene, into something holy and haunted—think less “Project Runway,” more the frothy tension of a friendship teetering on collapse, all stitched together in a fugue of memory and misunderstanding. There’s a pas de deux at work here—volatile, tender, inevitable—that the trailer all but dares you to look away from. No chance.And because melodrama demands a soundtrack that aches as much as the story, the roster is less a playlist and more a clarion call: Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, FKA twigs—names that know how to twine euphoria and heartbreak around a shivering note. All the better for 2 a.m. bedroom sobbing, or so the consensus seems to be on pop Twitter (yes, they’re already dissecting the snippets, in case you wondered if the hype is for real).Hathaway herself confesses to the sort of humility rarely glimpsed in scripted confessionals. Standing on that proverbial stage, she lets drop the armor: "Being a beginner, and being okay at being occasionally bad—that was the challenge.” There’s something strangely comforting about hearing the woman who once survived Fantine’s haircut and Miranda Priestly’s glare talking about learning to stumble, fall, get up, and shimmer anyway. Almost makes you wish more pop icons admitted to the bruises beneath the rhinestones.Hunter Schafer—yes, she of the Botticelli-meets-Balenciaga school of red carpet myth-making—slides in as the assistant to Coel’s battered designer. A supporting role, perhaps, but it’s rumored that Schafer’s ethereal presence nearly derails the whole emotional gravity of the piece. “Mind-blown” is her verdict. If the young starlet fresh from the latest “Hunger Games” and HBO’s gritty corridors is still spinning, audiences may want to buckle their seatbelts come 2026.Then again, what is any of this if not a spectacle of cost? “Mother Mary” isn’t another pop biopic that polishes every note until it gleams predictably. Beneath the neon and tulle is a meditation on how fame takes, costs, and sometimes—just sometimes—delivers that thing we’re all chasing: genuine connection, even if it’s chipped around the edges. There’s austerity in every ostentation, wildness in every whisper of silk, and just a hint of belligerence in the way the film stares down celebrity.Visually, every shot in that trailer—stadiums roaring, candles guttering in the barn, Hathaway’s mascara threatening insurrection—drips with tension and decadence in equal measure. The glamour’s heady, bordering on feverish, and just unhinged enough to keep even the most jaded red carpet critic alert. It’s hard not to see the fingerprints of earlier masterpieces—“A Star Is Born,” “Velvet Goldmine”—but Lowery and his cast are after something twistier, more subversive. Here, stardom is both mask and mirror, and rarely wears either comfortably for long.Somewhere in the crackle between spectacle and soul, “Mother Mary” seems to hit on a truth rarely named in glossy magazines: creative redemption looks different for everyone, and sometimes it comes at the cost of the thing that drew the crowd in the first place. Is the answer found in a daring couture dress? Maybe. Or maybe it’s the act of showing up, battered but radiant, for the final chorus.For all the trailers, think pieces, and chatter flooding the timelines in 2025, one thing’s certain: when “Mother Mary” lands next April, it won’t just be about who’s watching. It’s about who’s willing to feel it, bruises and all. Sometimes, that’s about as glamorous as it gets.