Ahead of the premiere of the William Oldroyd-directed film Eileen at the Sundance Film Festival, Anne Hathaway revealed it took her a moment to get comfortable with the script before taking on the role of Rebecca opposite Thomasin McKenzie’s Eileen.
Based on the book of the same name by Ottessa Moshfegh, and adapted for the screen by Moshfegh and her husband Luke Geobel, the film follows Eileen, a young woman working in a 1960s Boston prison and struggling with her own mental health issues. When glamorous psychologist Rebecca comes to work at the prison, a destructive and complex union is formed between the two women.
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“I came to this as a fan of Will’s,” Hathaway said at Deadline’s Sundance Studio on Saturday. “I’d seen Lady Macbeth and like probably a lot of people I thought it was the freshest thing I’d seen in ages. So when the script [for Eileen] came in I was inclined to say yes. I actually found the script really challenging the first time I read it. I found it really dark and really funny but it’s a tricky one. It’s so smart. it’s actually unusually smart, so it took me a few reads to feel like I had the beginnings of a handle on it.”
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Hathaway added that with McKenzie on board in the Eileen role, everything clicked.
McKenzie studied hard for the role she said, reading the book Eileen, which she described as “a bible for the character” and gathering all the intel on who Eileen truly was into a 32-page document which she sent to a prison psychologist back home in her native new Zealand for some added insight into the character.
“I was really curious about what it was like to work inside of a prison. Especially for a woman, because it was a prison for men and the majority of people working at the prison were men. So I thought it would be quite a vulnerable place for a young woman to work. The psychologist also gave me great insight into Eileen and what she might be struggling with. It was a lot of research into mental health, which is something I’m very interested in generally.”
The psychologist was also able to give McKenzie a medical definition of what ailed Eileen. “There was a diagnosis, but I don’t want to say what it was, because it presents differently for everybody,” McKenzie said.
Oldroyd first connected with Moshfegh and Goebel via Zoom at the start of the pandemic. As a fan of Moshfegh’s novels he had been intrigued. “What I found so exciting about the book and knew would make a good movie, is that it was just so funny and so dark, and that’s exactly the sort of thing I love.”
Eileen premieres at Sundance on Saturday at 6:25pm MST at the Eccles Theater, Park City.
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The Deadline Studio at Sundance Film Festival runs January 20-23 at Hotel Park City, where the cast and creatives behind the best and buzziest titles in this year’s lineup sit down with Deadline’s festival team to discuss their movies and the paths they took to get to Park City.
The 2023 Sundance Film Festival takes place from January 19-29. Follow Deadline’s complete coverage of the deals and the doings in Park City here.