Anne Hathaway may have left her home in Millburn decades ago, but she’s been frequenting New Jersey over the past few years thanks to her film projects.
Her latest, “Mothers’ Instinct,” is filming in Bergen County Monday with Jessica Chastain.
Oscar winners Hathaway, 39, and Chastain, 45, previously co-starred in “Interstellar” (2014) and can both be seen in the upcoming film “Armageddon Time,” another Hathaway movie that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and filmed in New Jersey last year.
In “Mothers’ Instinct,” a thriller set in the 1960s, Chastain plays Alice and Hathaway plays Celine, friends, neighbors and happy housewives whose sons are the same age. An accident destroys their world and their friendship.
The movie, which started production in May and has filmed in Union County, is filming Monday at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Ridgewood, the New Jersey Motion Picture & Television Commission tells NJ Advance Media. (Brooklyn native Hathaway’s parents, former Roman Catholics, converted to Episcopalianism after her brother came out as gay. She is not Episcopalian, as she reminded everyone after this Glamour story came out in 2018.)
Anne Hathaway — ahem, Annie — as Deadline reported, a producer of the film alongside Chastain, has been spotted locally on set in recent weeks wearing ’60s wigs and dresses, per the Daily Mail.
The film, directed by Benoit Delhomme and distributed by Neon, is based on the Barbara Abel novel “Derrière la Haine” (”Behind the Hate”) and is a remake of the 2018 Belgian movie “Duelles” (”Duels”), also known as “Mothers’ Instinct,” starring Veerle Baetens as Alice and Anne Coesens as Céline. That film’s director, Olivier Masset-Depasse, was previously attached as director of the Hathaway and Chastain film, but left the project.
Co-starring with Chastain and Hathaway are Josh Charles (”We Own This City,” “The Good Wife”) and Anders Danielsen Lie (”The Worst Person in the World”).
In the 1980s-set “Armageddon Time,” based on director James Gray’s Queens childhood and starring Hathaway, Jeremy Strong and Anthony Hopkins, Chastain plays real-life character Maryanne Trump, the retired federal judge who is former President Donald Trump’s sister. After two previous nominations, the actor won her first Oscar in March for playing Tammy Faye Bakker in “The Eyes of Tammy Faye.”
“Armageddon Time” filmed in local spots including Jersey City, Bayonne and Teaneck.
Hathaway, who won a supporting actress Oscar in 2013 for her performance in “Les Misérables,” also filmed the upcoming movie “Eileen” in New Jersey — including South Amboy and Metuchen — earlier this year. That film is based on another 1960s-set story, the 2015 book “Eileen” by Ottessa Moshfegh, about Eileen Dunlop, a woman who works as a secretary at a New England boys’ prison and becomes complicit in a crime.
Back in 2011, Hathaway was in Newark to film part of her performance as Selina Kyle, aka The Cat/Catwoman, alongside Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne/Batman in “The Dark Knight Rises” (2012).
