Anne Hathaway on How Beyonce Helped Her Find ‘Swag’ for ‘Mother Mary’

Anne Hathaway has played many roles across her two-decade career, but pop star is a new one. As a singer, she’s usually gravitated toward musical theatre — with an exception being her stellar cover of Queen’s “Somebody to Love” — but for David Lowery’s “Mother Mary,” coming from A24 on Friday, she had to go full pop star in the role of Mother Mary, a traumatized fictional singer reminiscent of Madonna and Lady Gaga.

It’s a very different style of singing and acting, and during a Q&A in New York on Tuesday, as part of a listening event for the seven-song soundtrack album sponsored by A24 and Spotify (and moderated by Variety‘s Jem Aswad), she revealed that Beyonce’s “American Requiem” was the key that unlocked her inner pop star.

“I grew up in a house with a phenomenal singer — my mother is a spectacular musical theater singer and with a really high belt,” she said. “I have such a different voice — mine’s much softer. And so in my head, I’ve never really rated myself as a singer because I don’t do what real singers do — like when I was growing up, I thought ‘Whitney Houston, that’s a real singer,’ and I just can’t do runs like that. But now that I’m older, I appreciate that I was comparing myself to someone who had a voice that sounded like it was touched by God,” she said, to cheers from the audience.

“So when I got this [part], it was a completely new way of singing, and it baffled me for the longest time. It took about two years before I finally cracked it. And so much of it was just studying what other singers did and trying to figure out, frankly, why they sounded so cool. Because musical theater is many wonderful things, but it’s not the coolest sound,” she laughed. “Not known for its swag!”

Not surprisingly, it was Queen Bey who led her to that swag.

“So I listened to ‘American Requiem’ by Beyoncé, over and over and over,” she said to cheers from the audience, which she encouraged — “I mean, come on! Do you think she can hear us?!” — before continuing. “Her technique in that song is so mesmerizing and astonishing: and listening to her phraseology, her musicianship, understanding the history of her voice that had led her to be able to make that sound that is so still, so present. I studied that, and I appreciated that Beyoncé can be a is a robastic vocalist, but she also knows how to be still.

“And I thought, okay, maybe there’s something to be said about having a sweet, still voice, maybe I can work with this. But learning pop phrasing was a really big deal — that was like learning a new language.”