Anne Hathaway is getting candid once again about her sobriety journey. In new interviews to promote her new film The Idea of You, the actor announced that she had recently celebrated being five years sober.
During an in-depth interview with The New York Times, Hathaway was asked about turning 40 in 2022 and what that meant to her. “I don’t take it that seriously. There are so many other things I identify as milestones,” she answered. “I don’t normally talk about it, but I am over five years sober. That feels like a milestone to me.”
Speaking to Entertainment Tonight at the New York premiere, Hathaway said she was proud of herself for choosing the path of sobriety. “I’m really grateful to just have been able to take the step that I needed,” she said.
Hathaway previously announced that she was going sober during an appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in January 2019, citing her then-2-year-old son Jonathan as the reason. Later that year, Hathaway and her husband, Adam Shulman, welcomed their second child, a son named Jack.
“I’m gonna stop drinking while my son’s living in my house,” she said at the time. “I don’t totally love the way I [drink], and he’s getting to an age where he really does need me all the time in the mornings… I did one school run one day where I dropped him off at school, I wasn’t driving, but I was hungover, and that was enough for me. I didn’t love that one.”
However, in a later interview with Boston Common Magazine, Hathaway made sure to clarify that she had a bigger problem with hangovers than drinking itself, saying that her last hangover “lasted for five days,” and her decision to stay sober while raising her son was not a “moralistic stance.”
“I just want to make this clear: Most people don’t have to do such an extreme thing,” she said. “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.”
