Anne Hathaway on Working with Director Rebecca Miller 20 Years After First Auditioning for Her (Exclusive)

“I’m just becoming friends with her now,” Hathaway tells PEOPLE of working with director Miller on “She Came to Me,” in theaters Friday

For Anne Hathaway, working with Rebecca Miller was a full-circle moment.

The actress stars alongside Peter Dinklage and Marisa Tomei She came to meromantic drama directed by Miller (The Private Lives of Pippa Lee) which follows Dinklage’s character Steven, an opera composer who experiences a breakdown before later finding inspiration – artistic and otherwise – in a tugboat captain (Tomei) as he struggles with work and family life, including his relationship with his wife Patricia (Hathaway).

In a PEOPLE interview with Hathaway and Miller about the film — which won a SAG-AFTRA interim agreement to allow promotion during the ongoing actors’ strike — the Oscar winner, 40, talked about how “it was everything I hope it will be and even more” to work with the director she first auditioned for 20 years ago, for a different project.

“I’m very proud of myself as a teenager because I have such refined taste that I recognized in Rebecca someone I really wanted to be more like,” Hathaway says. “And so the idea that we found ourselves at the right time with the right role, and now I just became friends with her.”

“Rebecca brings so much to the table, and I’ve loved all of your films, and this one is a really special addition to the canon of your work,” she tells the director.

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Anne Hathaway d She came to me (2023).

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Anne Hathaway encourages Peter Dinklage to ‘get lost’ She came to me Clip (Exclusive)

Miller is known for films like Angela (1995), The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005) and Maggie’s plan (2015). She is also the daughter of the late playwright Arthur Miller and the wife of retired actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

Recalling Hathaway’s first audition for her, Miller, 61, tells PEOPLE, “When I first met her, I think she was already a little too mature for what I was looking for. … And I needed someone who was almost less formed.”

“But now,” says the award-winning director, “it’s just been such a pleasure because Annie has a very complete way of looking at something.”

“She’s able to see the whole story, but she’s still deep inside her character and championing her character and really thinking it through in a really wonderful way, but at the same time she’s very instinctive,” Miller continues. “That’s the combination you always look for in a partner.”

Enter Peter Dinklage and Marisa Tomei She came to me (2023).

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Anne Hathaway hopes for a possible reunion with The devil wears Prada Costar Meryl Streep: ‘I want to. I want. I want.’

IN She came to meHathaway’s Type-A character, Patricia, is a psychiatrist who tells her uninspired husband Steven (Dinklage, 54) to go for a walk and “get lost” to spark his creativity.

But Patricia struggles with her own demons, many of which eventually come to the fore in the intense scene, which Hathaway joked to PEOPLE about “the same way you eat an elephant: one bite at a time.”

“I just kind of imagined someone who really built her life around taking care of other people and she kind of had three full-time jobs all at the same time,” she explains. “And the only way it worked was that she just didn’t have to ask herself specific questions. So it’s not like she ever was not herself, but she was a version of herself – just never all at the same time.”

As for Dinklage’s casting, Miller says she “wanted to redefine, rethink who would be a gorgeous, super attractive leading man, but in a new way.”

“And he’s so real, on the one hand, on screen, but he has tremendous comedic timing and can express angst in the funniest and most real way,” she adds.

When asked what kind of message he expects viewers to take away She came to mesays Miller to PEOPLE, “I think ‘Sometimes you just gotta get lost’ isn’t really a bad way to look at it.”

“That sometimes we all think we know where we’re going and we know who we are, and we’ve almost given up on being able to redefine our stories, and that there’s really no time when it’s too late to reclaim maybe your true self,” she says.

Hathaway calls the film, which also follows the relationship between Patricia’s teenage son Julian (Evan Ellison) and his girlfriend Teresa (Harlow Jane), “a love story that opens the door wide and says, ‘All in.’ ”

“And my heart needs it now. And the fact that it’s a film that feeds my brain as well, I’m thrilled about that,” she says. “The first time I saw this movie – where my heart was at the end, it was so full of joy and it exploded and full of laughter and emotion.”

Hathaway adds, “I’m just very, very proud to be a part of bringing something like that out into the world.”

She came to me is in theaters on Friday.

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