Anne Hathaway spoke about the inappropriate questions she received as a young actor at the premiere of her new film Eileen on Saturday (21 January).

The film – based on Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2015 novel – follows a young prison secretary (Thomasin McKenzie) who befriends a psychologist (Hathaway). However, the friendship soon becomes complicated by a heinous crime.

At a Q&A session following the film’s Sundance screening, Hathaway began by apologising in the event her answer was turned into “an annoying headline”, per The Hollywood Reporter.

Praising director William Oldroyd’s 2016 period drama Lady Macbeth, starring Florence Pugh, Hathaway said: “I thought it was extraordinary work. I saw a study of female complication that hit me really, really deep, and I felt like Will was a filmmaker that could be trusted to tell complicated stories, especially about females.”

The actor said she “just remembered one of the very first questions I ever got asked when I started acting work, when I had to do press, was, ‘Are you a good girl or a bad girl?’“I was 16, and my 16-year-old self wanted to respond with this film. Though I did not know that when I read the script, I think a part of me hoped for this exact moment.”

Hathaway was 16 when she was cast in Fox’s 1999 comedy-drama series, Get Real. She made her breakthrough two years later in Disney’s The Princess Diaries.

Speaking about her Eileen character, Rebecca, Hathaway added: “Rebecca to me represents someone, a woman who is undeniably brilliant, living during a moment in history where it’s quite dangerous to be a brilliant woman openly.”

Anne Hathaway at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)
She continued, per AP: “What we all kind of were going for was how would a brilliant woman both protect and empower herself in that time? That’s where a lot of the glamour comes in because she’s able to allow people to think what they want while keeping her private, fairly intense self, private.

“For me, this is a film about triggers,” she added. “Throughout the course of the movie, that inner life balloons, it gets triggered and it comes out with some pretty extreme results.”

Eileen is currently seeking a distributor.