Hathaway is sitting on the patio of a New York hotel; five or six stories up, her dog, Esmeralda, keeps whimpering from the balcony window. “Hi, baby!” Hathaway calls back. Esmeralda cries louder. “She’s so pretty. Ahh, it’s heartbreaking. She’s looking right at me.” And with that, Hathaway dashes upstairs.

Esmeralda, a 70-pound chocolate Labrador, was a present from Raffaello Follieri, Hathaway’s ex-boyfriend. You remember him, don’t you? Hathaway was splashed across the tabloids in June when he was arrested on charges of money laundering and fraud. Hathaway doesn’t want to talk about Follieri—there have been reports that the FBI, as part of its investigation, has confiscated some of her jewels and diaries. In that sense, Rachel Getting Married comes at a perfect time. It gives Hathaway something new, and very different, to focus on. “I’m curious again,” Hathaway says. “I seek adventure. Every time I see it in my head, it’s in the slanted ‘Indiana Jones’ font, and I get happy thinking about it: this is an adventure, this is an adventure.”

Now, she says she’s willing to accept change. She attributes a lot of that change to Rachel. At least physically, you can see the transformation on screen. Hathaway chopped her hair short and she started smoking, a habit she hasn’t kicked yet but she promises she will in two more days. She lived on a diet of pasta, pretzels and bread. “It had a nice bloating effect on my body,” she says. Hathaway even started dressing like her character. “I’d wind up buying a Hanes men’s T-shirt and some cruddy underwear.”

Hathaway says she and her character, Kym, clicked immediately—“almost like a medieval lock”—but their personalities couldn’t be more different. The actress is friendly and courteous, and a bit of a klutz. “She has a bad record with phones,” says her older brother Michael. “She loses them pretty frequently.” But like Kym, she’s a nomad, too. She and Follieri used to share an apartment in New York. “I don’t live anywhere right now,” she says. “Yes, my suitcase is a fun place to live out of.” Hathaway casually brings up Follieri from time to time, though not always by name. Yet even when she’s telling a story that has nothing to do with him, you see that he’s on her mind.

She talks about how a house fire destroyed her Barbies and baby clothes when she was 12, which made her less likely to get attached to things. “In my life, the more I love something, the more likely it is to get lost or ruined,” she says.

Hathaway’s a lot tougher than she gives herself credit for. Despite her Disney-princess lineage, Hathaway has proved that she’s willing to take major career risks. She followed The Princess Diaries with Havoc, in which she did her first topless scene as an L.A. rich girl, only to see the movie go straight to video. “For a while, I didn’t like that the one word I got again and again was ‘sweet’,” she says. “Sweet’s very simple. I thought, ‘Am I actually bland?’”

Rachel Getting Married is her most unsweet role yet. One journalist at the Toronto Film Festival told Hathaway that watching the movie was like getting a two-hour colonoscopy, to which Hathaway responded, “With or without anesthesia?”

Hathaway agrees to go for a walk, and you can see how unguarded she can be. “Excuse me, officer,” she says to a cop, “do you know where a liquor shop is?” The officer, who looks about 19, shakes his head, either unfazed or unaware that the star of The Princess Diaries is hitting him up for booze.

The new Anne also thinks about love differently. “The romantic I-knew-it-at-first-sight thing? No, I’m not really open to that,” she says, though that’s how she once described meeting Follieri. “Love is letting someone else see your faults and letting them stick around.” It’s not your classic fairy-tale definition, but it feels right, for a girl who’s retired her tiara.

Ramin Setoodeh - Newsweek