Anne Hathaway Listened to 1 Beyoncé Song ‘Over and Over and Over’ to Prepare for ‘Mother Mary’ Role
When Anne Hathaway was preparing for her role in Mother Mary, she turned to Beyoncé for character inspiration. Hathaway plays a pop star in the thriller. While she has sung in roles before this, she didn’t think her musical theater-inspired vocals were a good fit. She listened to one Cowboy Carter track on repeat as she tried to build a more pop-inspired sound.
Beyoncé inspired Anne Hathaway’s vocals in ‘Mother Mary’
As Hathaway tried to build her pop star character, she realized she’d need to sound like one. She turned to a Beyoncé song for inspiration.
“I listened to ‘American Requiem’ by Beyoncé, over and over and over,” she said during a Q&A (per Variety), adding, “Her technique in that song is so mesmerizing and astonishing: and listening to her phraseology, her musicianship, understanding the history of her voice that had led her to be able to make that sound that is so still, so present. I studied that, and I appreciated that Beyoncé can be a [powerful] vocalist, but she also knows how to be still.”
She studied the sound and attempted to replicate a version of it for her character. This wasn’t an easy task.
“And I thought, okay, maybe there’s something to be said about having a sweet, still voice, maybe I can work with this,” she said. “But learning pop phrasing was a really big deal — that was like learning a new language.”
Anne Hathaway admitted it took her two years to perfect the Beyoncé-inspired sound
Hathaway sang during her role as Fantine in Les Misérables. Still, she admitted she never really thought of herself as a singer.
“I grew up in a house with a phenomenal singer — my mother is a spectacular musical theater singer and with a really high belt,” she said. “I have such a different voice — mine’s much softer. And so in my head, I’ve never really rated myself as a singer because I don’t do what real singers do — like when I was growing up, I thought ‘Whitney Houston, that’s a real singer,’ and I just can’t do runs like that.”
She believed her voice had more of a musical theater tilt, which she didn’t think would work for her character. She joked that the genre is “not known for its swag.”
“So when I got this [part], it was a completely new way of singing, and it baffled me for the longest time. It took about two years before I finally cracked it,” she said. “And so much of it was just studying what other singers did and trying to figure out, frankly, why they sounded so cool.”
Mother Mary hits theaters on April 17.
She sang live for her Oscar-winning role in ‘Les Misérables’
In Les Mis, Hathaway sang “I Dreamed A Dream” live on set. She said she liked this better than singing on stage.
“I found it liberating to sing on camera,” she told Awardsline. “On stage, you have to indicate having a thought, and the word you are singing must indicate it as well, but on camera, you can have ideas, you can take in all the stimuli that the character would be taking in, there’s a freedom you get, and you don’t have the obligation to transmit each idea to the back of the house. It felt so much closer to reality for me.”
After just a handful of takes, Hathaway felt she’d nailed the song.
“We used earpieces to sing to a live piano track, and I sang it through once, but then I was having trouble hearing the piano, so I put in both earpieces so that I couldn’t hear myself,” she said. “The second and third take didn’t go straight through, but then it was the fourth take, which was only the second time I’d sung straight through, that Tom (Hooper) ended up using. I remember feeling this schism in me that maybe this was the one.”
Still, she said she made them shoot her singing it over a dozen more times, just to be safe.
