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When Anne Hathaway received the script for a new film, the Oscar-winning star assumed she was being considered for the lead in a cosy romantic comedy. After all, the writer-director Michael Showalter made his name in comedy, co-creating the Wet Hot American Summer franchise, as well as the acclaimed series Search Party. “I had no idea what it was about,” says Hathaway now. “I read the log-line and saw I was playing a writer. I’m like, ‘Oh, cool, we’re going to make a romcom about a writer!’ Then I read it… and it’s so not that.”
Indeed, Verity is very much not a romcom. The latest Colleen Hoover adaptation – we’ve averaged at least one a year since It Ends With Us made headlines for all the wrong reasons in 2024 – is deliciously deranged, a psychosexual thriller in the vein of throwback hits like Fatal Attraction and Body Heat.
Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, the bestselling author of a grisly crime series, suddenly incapacitated after a mysterious accident. Enter struggling writer Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) who Verity hires to complete her latest book. Lowen moves into Verity’s home for convenience, but it’s not long before lines are crossed and she is sleeping in her bed, wearing her clothes, and dining out with her husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett). A troubling discovery among Verity’s notes, though, raises alarm bells about her past.
If Verity sounds like a melodramatic concoction of Hitchcock, De Palma, and every erotic thriller from the 1990s, that’s the point. (Body Double, starring Johnson’s mother Melanie Griffith, was a clear inspiration; “It was interesting connecting those lineages,” Showalter says). But the film is best viewed as a love letter to mid-sized studio films depicting very attractive Hollywood A-listers mired in convoluted plots of sex and violence: Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Single White Female. Since the early 2000s, this type of film has become a dying breed, with attempts to resuscitate it – Fifty Shades of Grey; Deep Water – met with stony consternation from critics. Verity is hoping to whir the genre back into action.
“One of the very first movies that I watched when I started working on this was a film called Jagged Edge, which was written by Joe Eszterhas, who also wrote Basic Instinct,” Showalter explains. “He has such a flair for the operatic qualities of these stories, and the glamour – you’ve never seen Glenn Close and Jeff Bridges looking better than in the movie Jagged Edge. I wanted to celebrate how gorgeous these movie stars are and how much we love to look at them.”
For Hathaway, who also produced the movie and is now completing its press tour heavily pregnant, the modus operandi was to make Verity as risque as they could get away with. “We had to make the film as sexy as the book,” she says. “So all the sort of tingles – the so-wrong-it’s-right things about the book – we had to make sure that that was in there in the film.”
We had to make the film as sexy as the book
Anne Hathaway
Capturing the sexy spirit of the book meant embellishing Hoover’s work. In fact, it was a moment of improvisation between Hathaway and Johnson that gave rise to one of the film’s most memorable moments: a passionate kiss between the actors that plays out when Lowen’s sexual fantasy about Jeremy morphs into one about Verity. “Anne and Dakota were like, ‘What if we started kissing? What if it’s Josh, but then Josh turns into Anne?’” Showalter recalls. “It was first like, we can’t do that. Then, we have to do that, and if it doesn’t work, then we won’t put it in the movie. But it works quite amazingly.”
Hoover was initially nervous about adding in the new scene, but it ended up being her favourite part of the film. The author was instrumental in the film’s production – though she might have originally baulked at the idea of doing another adaptation after she was caught in the crossfire of Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni’s feud on the set (and off the set) of It Ends With Us. Was Showalter able to give her a less stressful experience this time around? He suppresses a grin. “You’d have to ask her.”
Caught between the two women is Hartnett’s charming Jeremy. With the back-to-back releases of Oppenheimer, Trap, Black Mirror, and now Verity, the actor is in the middle of a resurgence, having left Hollywood at the peak of his fame in the early 2000s. It was Hathaway who insisted on his casting as Jeremy, having missed out on the opportunity to work with him previously.
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Hartnett won’t say which of her films he declined – “it’s unfair to the actors who played the role” – and Hathaway herself is clueless. “Josh won’t tell me! Apparently, there was a project he was close to saying yes to, but I’m unaware of what it is.” Whichever movie it was, Hartnett has wanted to work with Hathaway ever since, and told her so at an awards ceremony in 2023, after which she vowed to make it happen. Jump forward two years later, and the pair are playing a married couple on the set of Verity. “Annie was true to her word,” Hartnett says, with a smile.
For Hathaway, Verity caps off a particularly busy year following the release of Mother Mary, The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The End of Oak Street, not to mention Christopher Nolan’s box-office behemoth and awards frontrunner The Odyssey – or the fact she is pregnant with her third child. “It would have been a standout year if the only thing that I had going on was this unbelievably good stroke of fortune in my career, but the fact that I had such an exciting year in my personal life was absolutely like a wish coming true in real time,” she says, tenderly rubbing her belly. “I’ve had a partner in crime.”
‘Verity’ is in UK and US cinemas on Thursday, 1 October