It’s no secret that Anne Hathaway is willing to immerse herself entirely into a role for a movie. Well, she may have overdone it while filming Interstellar – to a point where she was so (literally) submerged that she actually got hypothermia.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter with co-stars Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, and director Christopher Nolan, the Oscar winner reveals that she had a brush with death when she stayed in the freezing waters of Iceland for too long during a swimming scene in which her astronaut character is adrift on a foreign planet.
She explains, “Everybody was cold at that point. We’d been shooting in the elements, and it’s not like I was the only one in pain. I was just the only one in specific pain, and I didn’t want to hold up shooting. But at some point, I wasn’t sure if I could feel my toes, or they started to tingle, and then I was feeling all sorts of weird flashes and things were getting a little hazy around the edges, and that’s when I turned to our first [assistant director], and I said, ‘Hey, I don’t know that much about hypothermia, but what are the symptoms?’”
“I explained what was going on, and he said, ‘Oh! Like, right now?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah!’ And so then he went over to Chris, and Chris was like, ‘OK — let’s roll, let’s roll, let’s roll right now!’” she continues. “And we were done shortly thereafter.”
Nolan adds, “There wasn’t anywhere to go in the vast expanse of water — vehicles adrift and stuff — so there wasn’t any quick solution.”
In all, Hathaway chalks up the whole mishap to a small leak in the suit, which may have actually been caused by herself.
“We had tested the suit a few months prior; it was not successfully waterproofed the first time. And when I went under and submerged, the outer suit filled up, and then I was wearing a suit that kayakers wear, called a dry suit. And human error, we didn’t close it all the way,” she says. “And you’re in the suit for hours and hours and hours, so there was about an inch opening in it, and I’m sitting in the water, which is not very warm. It filled up to here (points to shoulder level).”
With a budget of $165 million, Interstellar centers around four cosmonauts who embark on a mission to find a new habitable planet before Earth decays. The movie opens in theaters Nov. 7.
