Anne Hathaway found her voice as Rebekah Neumann with a little help from WeCrashed co-star Jared Leto. The Oscar-winning actress opened up to PopCulture.com about stepping into her role as one-half of the power-hungry couple behind the rise and fall of WeWork ahead of the Apple TV+ limited series‘ March 18 premiere, crediting her chemistry with Leto for the magic that happened on set.
“We just played, literally we just played,” she told PopCulture. “There [weren’t] like meetings where we sat down and strategized how we were going to do things. He showed up, I think it was my third day of filming, … and Adam [Neumann] was there. And I can’t explain it – [it] was something kind of just mysterious – when Adam showed up, Rebekah landed in me.”
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Hathaway recalled that she had been trying to “find the voice” for Rebekah, but as soon as she heard Leto as Adam, “he was like a tuning fork and I just knew how to speak.” She continued, “By the third take, we were improvising and dancing and just falling, and it just felt like that, and then we just, for six months, we just tried to honor that. We didn’t really consciously do anything. We just kept opening and trusting and being really grateful to each other.”
The real-life Rebekah is a “fascinating and complex and interesting and human” character for Hathaway to take on, and so the actress simply tried to “honor all of those things” in her portrayal. “I have a lot of love for human beings. I feel like we’re always equal parts admirable traits and there are aspects to ourselves where we haven’t quite arrived at yet, but we’re all hopefully growing towards something,” she shared. “And I just tried to reflect that with her.”
“She had such big ambitions, and it’s painful when you don’t fulfill all of the ambitions that you have, and so I just always tried to be sensitive to that and assume that her intentions were good and that this might just be one part of her life. And that her story can go on from here,” Hathaway continued. The series being based on a true story adds to that: “We all know what happened, and for me, the interesting part of a character is the complexity. So if we know what’s going to happen and we can take someone with a complicated story and get you to see all the complications and all the nuance, and maybe even recognize parts of yourself in them, that to me was a really worthy challenge,” she told PopCulture.
Casting Hathaway and Leto as Rebekah and Adam was a dream come true for executive producers and showrunners Lee Eisenberg and Drew Crevello, who told PopCulture that the duo was initially considered their “fantasy cast” during the writing process. “We’re like, well, I mean, Jared Leto, obviously, would be incredible. Anne Hathaway would be incredible. We’re not going to get them, but if we’re writing towards people, let’s write towards them,” Eisenberg recalled. “And when we get other people, we won’t mention it.”
Crevello chimed in that casting Leto as Adam was a no-brainer, as they needed someone who “basically had a rockstar’s charisma,” and the Thirty Seconds to Mars frontman is “not only a chameleonic actor, but also a rockstar.” When Leto agreed to sign on, Eisenberg recalled watching the “transformation” he underwent to become Adam. “So for all of pre-production, we were talking to Jared Leto, and then all of a sudden, the cameras started rolling and we called him Adam, and we were with Adam Neumann for the next four months,” he shared. “And then only afterwards, during post, as we’re editing the show, we met Jared Leto again.” WeCrashed premieres Friday, March 18, 2022 on Apple TV+.
