Back in January, the Les Miserables Oscar winner announced that she quit drinking. Anne Hathaway explained the reason she’s sober in more detail, and it’s truly heartwarming. She is doing it for her son. While on Ellen DeGeneres at the start of 2019, Hathaway explained that she had stopped drinking alcohol back in October 2018. She had vowed to put down the drink until her 3-year-old son, Jonathan Rosebanks Schulman, was old enough to move out of the house. “I don’t totally love the way I do it, and he’s getting to an age where he really does need me all the time, in the mornings,” she told Degeneres. She remembered a time she had joined her son at school, “I wasn’t driving, but I was hungover,” Hathaway explained. “That was enough for me. I didn’t love that one.”
In a recent interview with Tatler, the actress opened up more about what she would have done with her life if she hadn’t pursed acting. “I could have seen myself being a teacher. Or going into the military. Or being some kind of do-gooder with a death wish,” Hathaway said. Then she joked, “But more likely than anything else I would have been an alcoholic.”
The esteemed actress went on to explain that the way she drinks makes her “unavailable to [her] son”, which is what “bothers” her about her drinking habits. “My last hangover lasted for five days,” she said. “I’d earned it: it was a day drinking session with friends that went into an evening birthday party with one of my drinking buddies,” she told Tatler. “I will never be that person who can nurse a glass of wine throughout an entire evening.”
Jack Waterlot/Tatler.
While speaking with Boston Common, Hathaway took the time to clarify her previous statement. “I didn’t put [a drink] down because my drinking was a problem; I put it down because the way I drink leads me to have hangovers and those were the problem…When I’m at a stage in my life where there is enough space for me to have a hangover, I’ll start drinking again, but that won’t be until my kid is out of the house.”
She then added that she in no way is saying others should take the same measures she is.
“I just want to make this clear: Most people don’t have to do such an extreme thing. I don’t think drinking is bad. It’s just the way I do it—which I personally think is really fun and awesome—is just not the kind of fun and awesome that goes with having a child for me. But this isn’t a moralistic stance.”