Hollywood used to tell her she wasn’t sexy. She knew better: “I was like, ‘I’m a Scorpio. I know what I’m like on a Saturday night.’”

It’s a gray Manhattan morning, but Anne Hathaway and I are sitting in a restaurant so dazzlingly white, it looks like the afterlife scene in a movie. The Oscar winner is warm and considerate. I arrive 10 minutes early and she is already seated, in a white sweater and pale blue jeans, at a table she thought would be best for my recording purposes. The restaurant’s menu is strictly plant-based—we order green chickpea hummus, market beets, and honeynut squash—but Hathaway’s diet is not. Later she’ll deadpan, “I think everybody can agree I have the personality of a vegan.”

Anne Hathaway’s jacket, gloves, and belt by Chanel; bra and briefs by Atsuko Kudo; earrings by Bulgari; bracelets by Bulgari High Jewelry.Photograph by Norman Jean Roy; Styled by Deborah Afshani.

Hathaway has been famous for more years than she hasn’t and is well acquainted with the internet’s noisy opinions. She’s undergone an existential overhaul in the last five or so years—a period that coincided with giving up alcohol, new motherhood, turning 40, and treating herself with more grace. “This is the first time I’ve known myself this well,” she’ll later explain. “I don’t live in what others think of me. I know my own mind and I am connected to my own feelings.” Also: “I’m way quicker to laugh now.”

Her newfound clarity is evident on screens and red carpets, where she’s debuted a kaleidoscope of vivid colors and edgy silhouettes that have earned her Gen Z approval. Donatella Versace called the formerly pristine star “dangerous, but sexy”—the ultimate compliment for a Scorpio—and chose her to front her Icons campaign. Hathaway accompanied the designer to last year’s Met Gala, where she was a best-dressed revelation in a tweed gown held together by pearls and safety pins, à la Elizabeth Hurley, hair teased to ’90s supermodel heights. This May, she stars in and produces Amazon’s adaptation of Robinne Lee’s sex-positive romance novel The Idea of You, in which she plays a 40-year-old divorcée who finds love with a 24-year-old Harry Styles–esque boy-band member (Nicholas Galitzine). Now 41, Hathaway tells me she’s proud to depict a fully realized woman experiencing her sexual bloom at the time of life when women are told they’ll become invisible.

“PEOPLE WERE ADVISING ME THAT I ARMOR MYSELF AND KEEP A DISTANCE, AND THAT I HAVE TWO SELVES.… I DON’T DO IT THAT WAY.”

The restaurant we’re in is not just vegan but “high-vibration,” meaning that the food is as close to its natural state as possible. For Hathaway, reaching her own high vibration is tricky with a recorder running. “The idea of anything you say being picked to define you is daunting,” she says. She’s not as serious as interviews make her seem, she tells me. But as we first start talking at least, she’s definitely careful—present and engaged but also pausing to mentally scan answers for web-flammable sound bites before sharing them. “You don’t want to say anything to provoke any kind of reaction, but you also don’t want to say something that could be misinterpreted,” she says as we begin. “I’m feeling a little goldfishy.”

“What do we do to get out of that?” I say.