Luckily, she found it, and she’s finding her voice after a few years of media scrutiny as well. “For a very long time I felt I was being hunted, and it made me very unhappy. But in the past few years I’ve been working on changing the script inside my head. Life’s too short to be anyone but yourself. Let the chips fall where they may,” she says.

That pertains to a profile run about her in last year’s New York Times, rather unkindly titled “Do We Really Hate Anne Hathaway?” But Hathaway shrugs it off, adding her voice to a growing group of female celebs who are speaking up about sisterhood and sticking up for one another. (Does Taylor Swift need another squad member?) “There is a certain type of media that trades on desperation and will paint someone with that filter if it will make them money, whether the story is true or not,” she says. “That story was written by a man. Among the women I’ve worked with and met in my industry, I feel supported.”

And she’s also supporting herself these days, which is most important. “There was a stretch of my life when I wasn’t comfortable being myself. I didn’t think I was good enough,” she explains. “So I pretended to be someone I wasn’t. To be a person in the spotlight, I pretended to be someone who could be in the spotlight. I’m so over that now. I just try to be my best self all the time, with some notable late-night lapses.”