“Do you know what aspic is?” Anne Hathaway asks, her eyes going saucer-cup wide. “They put everything in there — strawberries, meat. Salad-flavored jello with romaine lettuce. If you ever feel like going down a very specific rabbit hole on the internet….” She breaks off, laughing.

An accidental education in gelatin-based entrées was perhaps the least of the actress’s learning experiences on the set of writer-director James Gray‘s big-hearted, deeply autobiographical coming-of-age drama Armageddon Time (in theaters Oct. 28). Still, playing the director’s late parents was something that both Hathaway, 39, and her costar Jeremy Strong, 43, felt “a tremendous sense of responsibility” taking on, Strong admits, so research became an integral part of that — down to the contents of the dinner table.

Set in working-class Queens circa 1980, the Film follows 12-year-old Paul (soulful newcomer Banks Repeta), his chaotic but loving Jewish-immigrant family, and the friendship he forms with a young Black classmate, Johnny (Jaylin Webb). It’s the dawn of the Reagan years, and all that comes with that: a peak era of American consumerism, class consciousness, and the last throes of post-War innocence. (Also, the Trumps. But more on that later.)

Hours before the movie’s North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival this past September, the pair have come together in the hushed anteroom of a mountain-top hotel suite, both looking about as far removed from their rumpled middle-aged avatars as it’s possible to be. Hathaway, movie-star willowy in a sculptural black leather smock underpinned with electric green, is quick to lean in and laugh; Strong, soft-spoken but intensely focused, is swathed in fawn-colored knitwear like the low-key Continental cool dad he is (the actor splits his time between New York and Copenhagen with his wife, a Danish psychiatrist, and their three young daughters). The two sat down with EW for a free-ranging conversation about, among other things, reaching for authenticity, getting weird with Anthony Hopkins, and the hazards of era-appropriate foodstuffs.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: James Gray has made a lot of big-canvas films: We Own the Night, Ad Astra, The Lost City of Z. But playing your director’s own parents must bring a very specific kind of pressure. How much did he want you to reflect his family as they really were, and how much did he leave you guys to bring your own color to it? 

JEREMY STRONG: I think James was sort of withholding about how much to share because he wanted us to find our own authentic interpretation and distillation of the essence of what he’d written. I personally felt that I needed to do more than that, in terms of rendering who this man actually was, who he was based on. So it was a push and pull, harmonious and wonderful and loving.

But I certainly was trying to pry as much as I possibly could, because I wanted it to be very specific to what he had written. And for that, I needed to have a very exact picture of who this man was in life before I felt I had the authority to open my mouth or walk onto that set. So that was the challenge, in a way — to get enough of that. 

James also just recently lost his father. Did you get a chance to meet the man behind your Irving Graff before he passed away?

STRONG: No, but I got to get a tape recorder in front of him, and a lot of what I do in the film is based on stuff that I was able to, by osmosis, absorb. James sharing anecdotes and details and jokes and stories and memories and music, and just all of that, is an aggregate of what’s in there. Sometimes as an actor, [it’s about] that thing Nina Simone said, “You don’t give them what they want, give them what they need.”

I had read that Robert De Niro was initially in the cast, so Anthony Hopkins seems like maybe not the most obvious substitute. But James explained that De Niro was actually going to be playing Irving’s father, so when he had to drop out of the film, he reworked the script and brought on Hopkins as entirely different character — his mother’s father. Anne, did James talk to you a lot about what it was like from a kid’s eye view to watch his mom go through some of the things she did with her own dad? He said she essentially had a nervous breakdown.

ANNE HATHAWAY: Not in a linear way, like “This happened, and then this happened.” I came on board I think during the first days of the pandemic, and we filmed this in the fall of 2021, so we had a long time to let that relationship set. Then it became about peeling the layers back, and for me, there’s so much clarity to the writing. She’s a woman who’s exhausted, overworked, underpaid — a dreamer who’s watching her life come up short again and again, but a fierce and loyal matriarch of this family. And she’s also a daughter who is both loved and resented, and she has her own feelings about that. And James was crucial in guiding me through all of that. 

I’m just aware, having been… How do I say this? I’ve been doing this for a long time. And I have gotten used to being, at the beginning of my career in particular, one of the few women on set in a very male-dominated environment. So you always know that there’s the “them” of the universal, but there’s also the female part of the experience that is often unsaid. So I felt that a huge part of my job was bringing that aspect of it — the things that we observe, the things that we as women pick up that might be invisible to men, that might not be something that interests them.

And especially being aware that the relationship a child has to a parent, in particular a male child has to his mother. There’s going to be a lot of things that could be taken for granted. So a lot of my questions to James were about the atmosphere of his home. What was the oxygen? I know that sounds maybe a little poetic, but I think it matters. What was playing on the television? What sort of music did your mother dance to? How many outfits did she have? Just those specifics, for me, allowed me to add nuance and dimension to something that was already so fully formed in its script form.

The disrespect of the dumplings! Your character, Esther, works so hard in that early scene to make dinner for her family. They’re all sitting down to eat and then Paul, her youngest son, just walks over to the phone and orders Chinese delivery.

HATHAWAY: Can you imagine? She’s trying so hard and then… She could have been a physicist, but here she is doing whatever. And then you can’t even eat the food she put on the table? Well, she could have had a lot of paths and she chose this specific one, thinking it would lead someplace, and she’s watching it not get there in time. And the person who is her easy relationship, her home, is her father. And so when he passes, from my perspective on the character, it’s sort of incalculable to describe how destabilizing that is for her. So that brings it back to the concept of a nervous breakdown. 

STRONG: And the concept of Armageddon Time. It’s that Clash song from 1979, but it’s Armageddon time for Esther, for Paul, for Johnny, of course, and for Irving and the country, which is what is so profound about the movie, is the layers and levels at which it operates simultaneously, how destabilizing the events of this moment in time are for the upheaval, for all of these people.

When you walk into something like this — outer-borough Queens, 1980 — and the wardrobe and the set design are so specific, does it feel a little more turnkey to you in terms of character? Or maybe just the fact that the film exists in such an analog, organic world? It’s pretty much the opposite of green screen.

HATHAWAY: We had brilliant production designer, a brilliant art department. A brilliant costume designer. [But] I think what you also don’t want to feel is that you’re cosplaying. For me, it was very important to say, “What was her wardrobe budget?” And James was like, “What wardrobe budget?” I’m like, “Exactly!” [Laughs] That matters to me. But I will say, it was really cool to walk in and see the ceramics from my childhood, that white one with the blue print on it and the glass thing on top of it, like the crockery bowls that were in my kitchen in Brooklyn in the ’80s growing up. It all felt very familiar, and that was transportive.

STRONG: I don’t know if this is true for Annie, but I know for me, nothing is turnkey. It’s quite laborious and sometimes torturous to get there to where you can begin. But having that all there was so incredibly transportive and additive. The house we were in, in terms of the level of verisimilitude, it’s as close to an exact replica of James’s childhood home as you could get. And we had James’s actual family photo album on the coffee table that we would look through in between setups. 

James has become more and more interested, I think, in breaking down the wall between himself and his work, which is why he was ready to make such a personal film. Having that photograph album there, it was really incredible. It wasn’t a prop. Sometimes, you feel like you walk onto a film set and all the work that you’ve done to make it real and to create your sense of belief, you almost have to work against the environment you’re in. And this was very much that environment [feeding] into what we were doing.

HATHAWAY: It’s kind of like the ego thing, the ego of: Look how great and authentic this is. If you’re there, I feel that perhaps you’ve not gone to the step beyond it, which is: Look how invisible all this is. I think for me, that’s what you aspire to.

STRONG: Yeah, where you don’t see the stitching.

STRONG: There were mothballs!

HATHAWAY: Oh, my God. There was a dank odor at times.

STRONG: I lived for a time with my grandfather in Flushing [Queens] in his basement, when I was a teenager. And I sort of visited that world, myself, working on this. My grandfather was a plumber and he lived in Flushing. There was a lot of him in this, but being on set evoked that world for me, too, in a really powerful way.

It does feel like you can almost taste the time period here, it’s so lived in and so tactile. But then you drop Anthony Hopkins into that, who’s extremely old-world, both as a character who survived WWII in Europe and of course as an actor, too. I know you guys have both worked with hugely famous people, you are very famous yourselves, but do you still get a little weird around somebody that iconic?

HATHAWAY: [Laughs] Well, I’m weird no matter who you put me around, but I did a sort of cease-to-function in our first scene. I’m so relieved that you can’t tell on-camera because I couldn’t actually say my lines. And he’s such a magnificent soul, such an illuminated being.

I feel very lucky because I have worked with some legendary legends, and I did feel weird in front of them, and I did miss opportunities. I didn’t pull up my chair and ask every question that I had, and I regret that. So I knew I didn’t want to do that this time. And I pushed myself to actually be open and my whole self, and not shut down and not hide, and it paid off. And he’s a great pal now, which is just amazing.

Your friend Tony. Is there a group text?

HATHAWAY: [smiling] Kind of.

STRONG: To me he’s Aaron Rabinowitz, so that made it easier for me on [set]. I think otherwise yeah, it would be hard because of how much I revere him. So it allows through a trick of the mind in a way, to relate with intimacy and immediacy. But we have this scene where [gesturing to Hathaway] you’re getting dinner ready and I’m fixing this fridge and the fridge wasn’t prepared in a way that exactly met with the text, so we wanted to just improvise it and do something with the Freon tubes. And so I said, “If Tony can just get my tool set, I’ll tell him what to do.” And he was game, so we were improvising and he put this headlamp on his head, shining a light and he was handing me ratchets to do whatever I was doing at the fridge. And we found something from Emma—

STRONG: Emma Lazarus. I lift my lamp beside the open door and you kept reciting that poem. And then Tony started singing “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life.” And it was just like a moment where time stood still for me. Obviously I’ll never forget it.

HATHAWAY: It’s funny. When we were talking before about the building of this world a bit, it was not lost on me how enormous it was getting to play a Jewish woman, considering that I’m not Jewish. And I feel like there’s this thing that happens when you are a woman growing up in a community where you absorb stories about women that maybe are not centralized, but it’s like it’s in the ether and you know about it. So I did a lot of research on Jewish women that Esther would’ve known about, not even consciously. And Lazarus and that poem, I had just been studying it, minutes before that scene. So when you said it, I was like, “Oh my God, I know all these words. That’s so crazy.” And then of course Tony stepped in and just…

STRONG: …and just started singing.

HATHAWAY: Suddenly we were levitating.

It’s interesting that in the past few years we’ve seen so many auteurs make these intensely personal and biographical films: Licorice Pizza, Hand of God, the two Souvenir movies that Joanna Hogg made.

Yes! And James said that Paul Thomas Anderson told him, “It’s just because we’re all getting old.” But for the most part, they’re not making films like Armageddon Time anymore. As actors, do you struggle more now than you might have 10 or 20 years ago to find projects like these? Because in many ways it feels like the mid-range movies, the smaller, more thoughtful dramas with medium-size budgets, have disappeared. Sort of like the middle class. 

HATHAWAY: Yes, absolutely. 

STRONG: Or it’s migrated to television, in a way.

HATHAWAY: Streamers will still take a risk on a mid-range budget. For me, it’s not about the making of them. It’s about the culture that receives them. And somebody said this to me the other day, about how in addition to the death of the middle class, there’s the death of the mall as a place, as a gathering point in America, where you could go and do things. And one of the things you would do at the mall is go to a movie, in addition to doing other things that we haven’t found a replacement for yet. And I’m an eternal optimist. We’ll see how that goes and it’s going, but I think you have to really fight for it.

But I do think that there are people out there who are still cinephiles in America. And I’d like to think that if we can just hold onto it, that we’ll all keep finding each other and there will be this resurgence and a film renaissance in America. I just have to think that it’s leading to that because the truth is, I find people all the time who love movies and want to talk about them and little movies that I’ve made. I made this movie called Colossal —

Which is so good! I still tell people to watch that.

HATHAWAY: Thank you very much.  People come up to me and maybe they found it five years after it came out. We have to keep making these movies because people have more time to find them on streaming. It’s a shame not to get to watch them on the big screen. It’s a shame not to have a collective conversation about them. All of those things, I do feel the loss of them, and I hope it’s not a permanent loss because that would fill me with grief. But people still find movies. It still happens and you can still be in conversation about them, just on a smaller level.

STRONG: And somehow, because there will always be the James Grays and the Alejandro [Iñárratus] and the Joanna Hoggs, I think there will always be deep, entrenched work, even though we live in this tentpole-streaming era. I’m not worried about that.

HATHAWAY: And I just have to say, I’m so buoyed by the success of Everything Everywhere All at Once, because I think what we got a glimpse of is that audiences are willing to get down and weird with a film if it holds them and speaks to them. I had such a great time at the movie theater when I saw that. And I was just so happy for everybody in the film and so proud of them for going for it.

And obviously the success of Top Gun: Maverick. I went with my family, and we had such an incredible time. So I’m hoping that because we had a couple of those this year, I’m hoping people remember how much fun it is to go to the movies in community.

On the flip side too, in some ways, there’s something sort of transgressive and great about movies like The Lost Daughter or Bardo landing on streamers — all these arthouse films that are reaching an audience that was unimaginable a few years ago.

HATHAWAY: That’s true. And it creates more economic opportunities for more people to have a seat at the table, which we should all be cheering for. I just have to give a shout-out to middle-aged and older female filmmakers who were doing it before it was cool. And still, by the way, having to fight for financing in it, and I think that we can be stepping up as a community in a more resolved way, in that sense. Because you hear the same arguments again and again about “Well, but have their films done well?” And you’re like, “But have we invested? Have we ever invested in people in a unilateral way?” And I don’t think we have, so until we’ve done that, how can these metrics mean anything? Anyway, that’s my soapbox, I’m off it. [Laughs]

That seems where stars like Brad Pitt have stepped in. His production company, Plan B, has made a lot of these kinds of films we’re talking about — small and mid-range dramas, movies centered on people of color like Selma and Moonlight and Minari.

STRONG: It’s interesting you bring up Plan B because I remember talking to [them] a couple years ago and they said that the common thread of the stories that they tell and what they’re interested in is the idea of complicity. And I think Armageddon Time is really a film about complicity.

STRONG: In the sense that complicity more than malevolence is the engine that drives and is a propagating force for racism, inequity, all of the divisions.

STRONG: Yeah, that’s that really what this film is about.  It is structured in a way that brings us to what seems like a small event, that is actually a colossal event in the life of this child and in his friend. And the way that James sets up the film, where the American dream is something that is accessible to one of these kids and not to the other, that the other kid’s dreams are expendable — it’s why the movie is tragic. And yet it doesn’t give any easy [answers]. No one is exonerated, I think, by the film.

Neither of you is in the scene at Paul’s school that features Donald Trump’s father, Fred, and his sister Mary, who’s played by Jessica Chastain. But did James talk to you guys much about putting the Trumps in there, and what that meant in the context of the movie?

STRONG: Well, it’s in the script, so we were aware. In a very brilliant and sort of a bleak way, it evokes of course our country right now, which is also embedded in this moment in 1980.

This is a question I’m sure you hear a lot, but how hard was it to leave Esther and Irving behind and jump into whatever you had next? For you Jeremy, to go back to the next season of Succession, and Anne, you have something like four films coming out over the next year.

HATHAWAY: I needed to walk away from Esther because of the nervousness. She’s a very undernourished woman in terms of, she does not have tactile love in her life. She’s not supported. And that feeling of grief and loss… I’ve lost a number of people in the last few years and I’ve had to rebuild myself. And so I was actually very excited to walk away from that sad part of her just because I feel like I’ve done that and I couldn’t rebuild her as well.

But I loved being in this family so much. This was a job I could have gone to every day for the rest of my life and been thrilled. And I know this sounds hyperbolic, but I’m sorry, I act from this place that I’m trusting you with my life. Feeling myself in a found family of actors, in this home that had been created with such meticulous invisible craft, was just a highlight for me in a very lucky career.

There was this one improv that I was coming in and out of, where Jeremy’s sitting there just eating everything. We went through a sheet of Entenmann’s cake. And then Jeremy was calling out for the Chinese food. Tovah [Feldshuh, who plays her mother] is just a genius and sitting there and I’m talking to the props department. They’re like, “Shit, we got rid of the Chinese food earlier.” And I whispered something in their ears like, “It’s fine, it’s fine, I know what you need.” 

So I walk on to camera with a bowl of pickles. And Jeremy’s like, “What’s that?” I go, “You don’t need any Chinese food. Eat the pickles.” And then Jeremy just starts housing pickles. James is losing his mind behind the monitor. And then eventually, 20 minutes into the improv, he yells “Cut.” He’s like, “We can’t do this anymore.” I’m like, “Oh, wait. We have to shoot another angle on the pickles so it matches.” And James goes, “Forget the pickles! This is madness!” [Laughs]

STRONG: Those pickles were his pickles, and we had them go buy them.

HATHAWAY: Of course! I didn’t know that, but somehow I knew that.

STRONG: I can’t remember what the name of the pickles were. Ba-Tampte, I think.

They were the right pickles, is what you’re saying?

HATHAWAY: They were the real-deal pickles.