Why Anne Hathaway Gave Up Veganism and Alcohol

Anne Hathaway has been open over the years about a couple of major lifestyle changes, first adopting and later abandoning a vegan diet, and separately choosing to give up drinking altogether.

Both decisions came down to the same underlying theme: paying attention to how something actually made her feel rather than sticking with it out of principle.

Why She Stopped Being Vegan

Hathaway first went plant-based around 2011 to slim down for the role of Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, and she stuck with the diet through other physically demanding parts, including Fantine in Les Misérables.

She kept it up for roughly two years, carrying it into the early stages of filming Interstellar, a role that had her suspended in harnesses and submerged in freezing water while wearing a 40-pound spacesuit for weeks at a time.

The diet finally cracked during a dinner in Iceland with her Interstellar co-star Matt Damon and her husband, Adam Shulman.

According to her own account, her husband had just wrapped up a year of veganism himself but broke it that night by letting the chef choose his meal, which turned out to be reindeer carpaccio, leaving Hathaway as the last one still holding onto the diet at the table.

She asked about the fish instead, was pointed toward the fjord right outside the restaurant, and ended up eating a piece of salmon.

She’s said the effect was almost immediate, describing the shift in energy as feeling like her brain was rebooting after being sluggish for months. She’d previously told another interviewer that while vegan, she never quite felt strong, healthy, or like herself.

Why She Gave Up Alcohol

The decision to stop drinking came a few years later and was driven by something more personal than a diet plan.

Hathaway has said the turning point came after a morning school drop-off with her oldest son, Jonathan, while she was hungover, an experience that made her realize she wasn’t showing up for him the way she wanted to.

She announced the decision publicly in early 2019, explaining she planned to stay off alcohol for as long as her son was living at home, a commitment she initially framed as potentially lasting close to two decades.

She’s been careful to clarify that she didn’t see her drinking as a problem in the addiction sense, but rather that her particular pattern of drinking reliably led to rough hangovers, including one that reportedly lasted five days.

By 2024, she’d reframed the decision in a slightly different light, describing her relationship with alcohol as something she’d stopped fighting, comparing it to living with an allergy rather than a habit she was actively resisting.

Around the same time, she shared that she’d passed the five-year mark of sobriety, calling it a genuine milestone rather than a temporary phase.

The Common Thread

Neither decision was framed as a moral stance or a permanent identity. In both cases, Hathaway made the change because of a direct, felt difference, more energy after eating fish, more presence and stability after cutting out alcohol, rather than sticking to a rule for its own sake.

That willingness to reverse course when something clearly wasn’t working is really the throughline in both stories. She’s spoken about both changes as personal experiments that happened to pay off, not permanent philosophies she expects anyone else to follow.