When Will We Accept Anne Hathaway as One of the Greatest Actresses of her Generation?

The first time we see Anne Hathaway in HBO Max’s Locked Down, we can’t see her face. Instead we see her twin fists tightening around a pure white pillowcase covering her head. Her character, Linda, is stuck in London’s first COVID-19 lockdown with long-time partner Paxton (Chiwetel Ejiofor) just as they’ve broken up. Worse, Linda has been told by her posh employers to fire her team, as they are redundant while she is poised for a promotion. Linda is living through her own version of hell, and Anne Hathaway looks to be in heaven playing it.

Throughout the two-hour-long runtime of Locked Down, Hathaway inhabits a modern woman coming apart at the seams. She has to confront her professional choices, personal missteps, and — worst of all — her own fretful worry that she’s trapped herself in a cage of her own design. She is fraying and drinking and lost, until she realizes that fate has delivered her and Paxton a golden opportunity to steal a $3 million diamond. Throughout the final act of Locked Down, Linda struggles not with the question of whether or not she can pull off this heist, but whether she should. It’s a deep question, buoyed by a deceptively deep performance, from one of America’s still most underrated screen actresses.

Anne Hathaway makes Linda’s roller coaster of inner turmoil look not only effortless, but fun. It’s a role that asks her to tap into everything from her genius comic timing to her career-long talent at capturing the awkward, existential mess of being a millennial. Locked Down is just the latest film where Hathaway is allowed to chew scenery, deliver fabulously frank monologues, and slip into another character like a second skin. It is, along with the rest of her oeuvre, proof that she is a masterful actress. Perhaps even the best American film actress of her generation. So isn’t about time we accepted Anne Hathaway as the national treasure she is?

Anne Hathaway made her film debut playing an awkward Bay Area teen who discovers she’s royalty in Garry Marshall’s The Princess Diaries. As Mia Thermopolis, Hathaway had to be both perfectly relatable and — eventually — wonderfully polished. Between this and 2004’s Ella Enchanted, Hathaway carved out a niche for herself as a modern-day fairy tale princess. (A gig harder than it looks.) Obviously concerned about potential type-casting, Hathaway pivoted to mature dramas with a role in the Oscar-winning Brokeback Mountain and the modern-day comedy classic The Devil Wears Prada (where she held her own against Meryl Streep).

Since then, Hathaway has tread the boards performing Shakespeare in the Park at the Delacorte, earned raves for indie flick Rachel Getting Married, channeled Hedy Lamar as Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, and won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Fantine in Les Misérables. Her splashiest role in recent memory? Playing a deceptively thick starlet in 2018’s Oceans’s 8. It was a performance that unleashed a tidal wave of fawning reviews and newfound appreciations of Hathaway’s comic talents.

The thing is Anne Hathaway has always been great and I’m tired of us always acting like it’s such a surprise! Seriously! I feel like every two to three years, I have to write a piece extolling the New Jersey native’s virtues as both a virtuoso performer and unstoppable movie star. In the past, she’s been overlooked because she gravitates towards crowd-pleasers over ponderous indies. She’s been mocked for being a trier; a performer who wears her heart on her sleeve and really strives to do a good job.

The thing is Anne Hathaway always does a good job. Even if a film is sub-par, you can bet that Hathaway is serving either pitch perfect comic timing or a devastatingly dramatic turn. She is a theatric actress, to be sure, but that kind of makes her stand out beside a lot of her peers. (And speaking of her peers, how many of them has she expertly lampooned on Saturday Night Live over the years? Claire Danes may have been literally found shaking over Hathaway’s impression of her.)

Anne Hathaway’s always been great, but Locked Down seems to double down on a new era in her career. Lately, Hathaway has been throwing herself into campy roles like in HBO Max’s The Witches and the aforementioned Ocean’s 8. These roles let her harness her theatric leanings appropriately, not to mention the fact that she seems to be having more fun than ever before. Linda in Locked Down isn’t as campy as the Grand High Witch, to be sure, but she gets to exist like a raw, screaming nerve. And Hathaway? Anne Hathaway looks like she’s having the time of her life puffing cigarettes in secret, biking through London, and planning a heist with Chiwetel Ejiofor.

Locked Down isn’t the greatest role of Anne Hathaway’s career, but yet another great one. She is a singularly talented actress who balances the showmanship of being a movie star with real, under-appreciated craft. The question is when are we going to finally accept Anne Hathaway’s greatness? She already seems to have embraced it.

Where to stream Locked Down (2021)