Anne Hathaway Wouldn’t Talk to Robert De Niro for Weeks When Working With Him on ‘The Intern’
Robert De Niro and Princess Diaries star Anne Hathaway once teamed up for the 2015 feature The Intern. After their initial meeting, however, Hathaway admitted to giving the veteran actor a bit of the silent treatment at first.
Anne Hathaway was initially terrified of Robert De Niro
Hathaway couldn’t get over working alongside De Niro in director Nancy Meyer’s The Intern. In the feature, De Niro played the titular intern of an online fashion site ran by Hathaway’s character. But because of De Niro’s pedigree and reputation, Hathaway constantly found herself tongue-tied around the Oscar-winner.
“I couldn’t talk around him for the first three weeks – I just felt like an idiot, everything I said,” Hathaway once said according to Impulse Gamer. “And once I calmed down about that, I just trusted the words. It didn’t matter how I felt, because Jules feels comfortable around Ben and I just trusted that that was going to carry us. And Ben feels comfortable around Jules. And Nancy was going to guide us, and it worked.”
Hathaway even joked that the pair became getting even closer by taking a trip to the mall.
“Bob and I did some extreme bonding at the Century 21 mall. We went shopping… No. We didn’t do anything special. But that’s a funny thing. I just trusted everything was going to be okay. Bob’s an easy guy to get along with. He is, as Nancy said, incredibly Zen and calm and approachable,” she said.
Anne Hathaway got in trouble after saying Robert De Niro liked ‘The Bachelor’
During their bonding process, Hathaway thought she learned a lot about her co-star’s tastes in media that came as a surprise. Hathaway once confided that De Niro was a fan of the long-running ABC reality series The Bachelor.
“The man loves The Bachelor,” she once told Refinery 29.
For proof, Hathaway showed an e-mail the Raging Bull star sent Hathaway and Meyers professing his fandom for the television show.
“’You bet your ass I’m a big Bachelor fan,’” the message read.
The media ran with the quote at the time. But Hathaway later had to clarify she made an error when sharing De Niro’s small secret with the world.
“He doesn’t actually like the show,” Hathaway revealed to Good Morning America.
De Niro was just joking at the time, which Hathaway didn’t realize until later.
“He was being sarcastic and I don’t understand sarcasm in email form and I told the world that he liked The Bachelor,” Hathaway said. “That was such a bad thing to do.”
Still, Hathaway looked back fondly at her time with De Niro, and was inspired by the actor’s work ethic.
“He’s a quiet guy, you know, he’s not a million jokes a minute but he cares about what he does so much,” she said. “He has such respect for everyone on the crew and he takes so seriously what he does, even if it’s a comedy, and I just loved being around him.”
Anne Hathaway used to make movies out of insecurity until ‘The Intern’
Although boasting a very successful career, Hathaway admitted that she didn’t choose her film roles with the best intentions. But The Intern was the first role in perhaps a long while that she picked a role for better reasons.
“I can’t explain why it happened on this movie,” she once said according to Toronto Sun. “But, until now, I’ve made a lot of my movies from a place of insecurity and self-doubt. I got tired of that, so I decided to make one from a more positive place and to feel good about what I was doing and embrace the unknowns … It turns out you can make a movie without non-stop sleepless nights.”
