Anne Hathaway has spoken candidly about having more children, highlighting the challenges that can come with fertility and pregnancy.
Hathaway, 39, currently shares two children, Jonathan, who is almost six, and Jack, two, with her husband, Adam Shulman. The actor discussed if she ever wanted to have a third child during a recent interview for WSJ. Magazine’s digital cover.
And while Hathaway said that she “could see [her and husband] going for another,” she also expressed how “getting pregnant” can be quite “complicated”.
“There’s this tendency to portray getting pregnant, having kids, in one light, as if it’s all positive,” the WeCrashed star explained. “But I know from my own experience…it’s so much more complicated than that.”
“And when you find out that your pain is shared by others…you just think, I just feel that’s helpful information to have, so I’m not isolated in my pain,” she added.
She emphasised how the that has pain come from her pregnancy struggles isn’t something that she’s embarrassed about.
“I mean, what is there to be ashamed of?” she asked. “This is grief, and that’s a part of life.”
According to Hathaway, being a mother shaped her into the person she wanted to be, as she didn’t “feel fully landed” before her children.
“I didn’t feel fully landed and fully here until I was a mom,” she said. “It’s not like I was lacking integrity, but it made me want to be completely, on every level, true to my word. And that meant stopping any nonsense that I had going on inside myself. And it’s little breaks that you give yourself sometimes when you know that you’re not being your best self.”
The Princess Diaries star also recalled to the publication how when she first got pregnant, her peers told her that she might not care as much about her career after she had her child. However, Hathaway “found that wasn’t the case,” as she “actually cared quite a bit more” about her job.
Regarding how she’d feel if her two sons followed in her footsteps, Hathaway said that she would “strongly discourage them” from starting acting careers at a young age.
“I would probably take the same tack that my parents did with me, which is: You have all the time in the world to be a professional actor; you can only be a child once,” she explained.
“So I would encourage them to study, to go to classes, to read,” she continued. “But I would strongly discourage them from starting too young. I think that they’ll be in a position where they’ll be able to go to college and figure out where they want to go from there.”
Hathaway has recently opened up about how happy she is to parent her children during an interview with Today’s Hoda Kotb.
“There’s so much joy,” she said. “I feel like they bring an innate purpose to everything. I could go on about it, but it also leaves me a little speeches. I just feel really lucky, it’s something I always wanted, and I’m just so lucky that it happened to me.”
