Anne Hathaway Studied a Patricia Neal Coffee Ad to Master Her Transatlantic Accent in ‘Eileen’

Parasitic obsession poisons the roots of William Oldroyd’s perverse noir romance “Eileen.” The film is adapted by screenwriter Ottessa Moshfegh and her partner Luke Goebel from her own mean and pungent novella about a repressed 24-year-old prison secretary who, in 1964 Massachusetts, falls under the spell of a beautiful, blond-headed Harvard-grad psychologist named, of all things, Rebecca. Is that on-the-nose-Hitchcockian enough for you?

Eileen is played by Thomasin McKenzie, while Rebecca is played by Anne Hathaway, who slurps martinis and says things like “I shouldn’t smoke, but I do.” She drifts into Eileen’s world like a vapor, and then, just as quickly, is gone. But not without bringing chaos crashing down onto Eileen’s life amid a depraved dance of muted desire.

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Hathaway, who is now nominated for a Film Independent Spirit Award for Best Supporting Performer, certainly evokes Katharine Hepburn (and maybe even Cate Blanchett’s Carol Aird) in her manner of speaking. But her unlikely source of inspiration for her transatlantic accent was actually an ad campaign for Maxim Instant Coffee featuring “Hud” Academy Award winner Patricia Neal from the 1970s.

Hathaway, in a recent IndieWire interview, explained how she came up with Rebecca’s aloof, early-20th-century upper-class enunciation.

“Some of it was intuitive. I’ve heard this accent,” Hathaway said. “I love classic movies. I’ve heard this accent done so many times. Where does it live inside of me? And then I checked in with Katharine Hepburn films because [Rebecca] says to Eileen, you’re a regular Katharine Hepburn. So I thought there might be some affinity there, but I got a lot of inspiration from Patricia Neal, specifically from a coffee commercial that she did in the 1970s for an instant coffee. It’s just kind of this dark, smoky sound, and I really didn’t care what it was she was talking about. She’s literally selling us instant coffee, but there’s something almost hypnotic about it. And so I got into that idea: how do you create a sound that is artificial but incredibly appealing and magnetic at the same time?”

Has Anne Hathaway seen the beloved Lauren Bacall High Point coffee commercials that, while adopting a similar speaking tone, are now the stuff of queer camp?

“She was probably the successor to Patricia,” Hathaway said. “It might even be the same company.” Bacall’s came in the ‘80s and were for a different company, but Hathaway’s cinematic influence makes sense for a movie that is homaging Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” just as much as Todd Haynes’ classic-cinema-infused “Carol.”

Hathaway said she was drawn to “that sort of idea that you’ve got this sound that can make anything, that it’s a seductive sound and the idea that there’s something about it that opens you up and makes you lean in and want to trust this person before you’ve had a chance to ask yourself if you should.”

Rebecca has an elusive aura around her that acquires a more sinister vibe as the movie drives forward (and partly beginning with a certain third-act primal scream that’s one of Hathaway’s most iconic moments ever, signaling Rebecca breaking her own character). But how much of her is being actively mythologized by unreliable narrator Eileen, for whom Rebecca represents a world outside her own?

“Part of the reason why she appears like an apparition is because she’s somebody who has a tendency to leave messes behind her,” Hathaway said. “We have to remember that Eileen is a very unreliable narrator, and how much of the Rebecca who is in the film is the real Rebecca is totally up to the audience’s interpretation, and I don’t necessarily think the woman that I played is the woman that existed.”

“Eileen” is now in theaters from Neon.

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