Anne Hathaway & Thomasin McKenzie Open Up About Playing Complicated Female Characters in Eileen: 'Perfection Is Such a Waste of Time'

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Although we might not realize it, we’ve all grown a little too familiar with some of the female tropes in movies in TV shows. From a doting wife, a damsel in distress, or a hardworking woman who has no time for anything else in her life, female characters can sometimes feel so one-dimensional and shallow.

In the upcoming movie Eileen, which was adapted from Ottessa Moshfegh’s bestselling novel by the same name, however, the characters are far from boring. The movie follows a young girl named Eileen (played by Thomasin McKenzie) in 1964 who works at an all-boy’s prison and becomes enamored by the prison’s new counselor, Rebecca (played by Anne Hathaway).

Talking to SheKnows, both stars talked about how liberating it felt to play such complex and differing characters. “When I saw the end of the first season of Fleabag, I had a very unexpected reaction to the final episodes, I just started crying like sobbing and my husband’s like, ‘Are you okay?’ And I said, ‘I just can’t think of a time in my life as an audience member or an artist where I’ve seen three women on screen making terrible choices,'” Hathaway remembers. “It’s so thrilling.”

Therefore, when the script for Eileen came along, Hathaway jumped at the opportunity. “I was very excited to be a part of a story about facades, and how toxic they can be, and the danger of them,” she says. “And to show that just because something has an appropriate picket-fence-exterior, so just because something looks nice, or good, or any of that stuff, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a raging beast underneath.”

The Devil Wears Prada star then poignantly adds, “I just want to say that perfection is such a waste of time. Really, because we’re not here to do that, that’s not the point. Perfection and excellence are two very different things.” Can we get that printed everywhere, please?

McKenzie, for her part, couldn’t agree more. “When we were filming the penultimate scene we all kind of realized how amazing it was what we were doing,” she says, referring to a scene between her, Hathaway and Marin Ireland (who plays one of the prisoner’s mom, Mrs. Polk, in the movie). “Because each of us were playing three completely different characters and I feel like it’s quite rare that you see such different female characters on the screen in one film in one scene,” she continues. “That was very exciting.”

Despite being a script both immediately connected with, it was only the beginning of their preparation. After all, any book-to-screen adaptation means having much more material to learn from before the cameras start rolling.

“Having the book made for me made it easier because it was such an incredible resource to get to know the character,” McKenzie says of the experience. “But I was definitely nervous about wanting to do the book justice because Ottessa has so many fans, she’s such an incredible writer, so wanting to do her work justice and not wanting to ruin the book,” she says, adding that having the book as material was “easier in some ways and harder in others.”

For Hathaway, having both the script and the novel meant even more information on how to get her character just right. “I read the script first, and then I read the book after and they complemented each other so beautifully,” she remembers.

Most of all, the novel helped unlock Rebecca’s true essence for the Oscar winner. “I felt very released by a line in the book because my instinct with Rebecca was that – to borrow something from Breakfast at Tiffany’s – that she was a real phony and my instinct was to make her heightened and I thought I was going to have to pitch it a certain way to be able to explore the language.” That’s when she read the line in the book “If she sounded affected, it’s because she was. If she sounded over the top, it’s because she was” and that immediately resonated with Hathaway. “When I read that line, I was like, ‘Game on!'”

Hathaway and McKenzie’s infinitely complex and interesting characters in Eileen hit theaters on Dec. 1.

Before you go, click here to see our favorite movies and TV shows about imperfect, complicated women.