For Anne Hathaway, life doesn’t always imitate art.
“Alex Cooper and ‘Call Her Daddy’ was scripted, and then I just, in a production meeting said, ‘Is that enough to establish Verity as an iconic cultural figure?’” Hathaway, 43, said during a Friday, September 25, appearance on the “Talk Of The Townsends” podcast, discussing her role in the upcoming film Verity. “[I thought] if we could do something, like, get a Gayle King interview and Hot Ones that would be, like, the triple crown trifecta.”
Verity, based on Colleen Hoover’s bestselling thriller novel of the same name, follows a struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson), who is hired to finish renewed author Verity Crawford’s unpublished book (Hathaway) after she was paralyzed in a car accident.
In the movie, Hathaway’s character is interviewed by podcast host Cooper, 32, and was grilled by Sean Evans while eating spicy chicken wings, respectively.
“I’ve never done it before. I’ve never done the 10-piece gauntlet,” Hathaway noted of the real-life interview show, in which celebrities take a bite of wings covered in progressively hotter sauces. “You don’t want your first kiss ever in your life to be, like, an onscreen kiss, you want that to be a real thing where you’re not playing a character at the same time as experiencing something physically.”
The Oscar winner had tried to adopt the same mindset during her fictional Hot Ones cameo.
“I did the first three wings for real, and then I switched into dummy wings,” she quipped on Friday. “I thought that I was gonna be able to do the Hot Ones challenge to do press for this film because it just made sense. But then, I got pregnant.”
Anne Hathaway in ‘Verity’ Alisha Wetherill /Amazon Prime Video /Courtesy Everett Collection
Hathaway and her husband, Adam Shulman, announced in June that they are expecting their third baby. (The couple already share sons Jonathan, 10, and Jack, 6.)
Due to her pregnancy, Hathaway’s doctors advised her against tackling Evans’ infamous hot wings challenge.
“My doctor said I couldn’t do it because I might go into early labor,” she said, laughing. “So, I still haven’t done the gauntlet yet. I’m not sure when that’s going to happen. Maybe next year.”
Despite her pregnancy putting her Hot Ones dream on the back burner, Hathaway has embraced her journey with pure gratitude given her age and past fertility challenges.
“There’s always hope until there’s not, but when you get to a certain age, that hope looks like it’s 1 percent to 2 percent,” she told Access Hollywood in July. “We just decided to see where life took us with a very, very healthy, realistic expectation, which was very low.”
She continued at the time, “We’re overjoyed because we just know from personal experience that not everybody gets this, and certainly not when you want it — sometimes not ever. It’s a blessing that we do not take for granted.”
Verity hits theaters Friday, October 2.
