Anne Hathaway was more than ready to go to infinity and beyond.
"When I stepped on the set, I geeked out," she says of her first day shooting Interstellar, the much-anticipated space travel thriller from Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan. "And when I put on the space suit, I freaked out!"
Hathaway and Matthew McConaughey play astronauts trying to find a new planet to house the citizens of Earth, which has been ravaged by famine. With wormholes, black holes and even Einstein's theory of relativity figuring into the epic plot, "the nerdery was out of control on this movie," Hathaway joked at the film's Los Angeles premiere on Oct. 26. "It's like a real treat to have a practical set to interact with. It helped us escape into the world of believing it."
But the movie, in theaters Nov. 5, is also grounded in the personal stories of the humans aboard. McConaughey calls it "one hell of a ride, further out there to the outer orbits of space than we've ever gone." But, he adds, "It's a very intimate movie, and the ironic thing is that the further out there in the large scope and what would be considered sci‑fi, the more personal the movie becomes."
As for acting in a spacesuit? Both stars were up for the challenge. "The suit was actually only 40 lbs.," McConaughey explained at a press conference earlier. "A real spacesuit's closer to 100. So they did a lot of work on making it as light as possible. It was easy to maneuver in. Couldn't break out into a sprint, no. Couldn't jump as high, no. Once you had the suit on, a lot of … what you could express directly was from the neck up and sometimes through the mask." The most physically demanding scene was filmed "in Iceland in a spacesuit on a glacier. With the elements … [a] couple helicopters, 50 mph winds."
Hathaway decided the spacesuit "was my favorite costume I had ever worn" (while noting that thanks to Nolan – who cast her as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises – she's worn "some pretty spectacular ones"). But "this one was the closest I've ever felt to feeling like a kid at Halloween!"
