Anne Hathaway has had quite the career—The Princess Diaries, The Devil Wears Prada (and the sequel), Interstellar, Love & Other Drugs, The Dark Knight Rises—need I go on? But it turns out, even successful movie stars have regrets, as The Odyssey actress revealed in an interview with her co-star, Matt Damon.
Anne Hathaway Reveals Her One Big Career Regret, While Co-Star Matt Damon Confesses He Almost Declined *This* Iconic Role
To the roles that almost were (or weren't)
Published Jul 28, 2026
•6:23pm
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During an interview with Harper's Bazar UK, Damon asked Hathaway if there was a role she'd turned down that she still thought about.
"Not really. What I regret is the way I've turned things down," she reflected.
"What I know now is that you always meet with the director," Hathaway continued. "You just get a feel for each other. The director of that project is somebody that I have wanted to work with since, and I don't know that I'm going to get the opportunity. He really wanted me for this part and there's something about it that didn't resonate with me. I thought I was being respectful by giving them a bunch of quick nos but he came back a bunch of times and in hindsight, I should have sat down with him, should have looked him eye-to-eye, explained what was going on for me and given him a chance to plead his case."
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Damon then revealed he nearly had the same story and had planned to turn down Ridley Scott's The Martian, the 2015 space epic starring the actor as an astronaut stranded on Mars after a freak accident.
"I had just done that part in Interstellar and I got so in my head," Damon recalled. "I said, 'I just played a guy stranded on a planet, I can't then go and play a guy stranded on a planet.' This is me just classically, stupidly overthinking things. So I said that out loud to Ridley, and without missing a beat he [says], 'Oh, no one gives a sh-t.' And I was like, 'Alright, I'll do it.' And it was one of the great decisions I made in my life because it was a great role. Ridley and I had a ball doing it."
Hathaway chimed in, saying she wished this is what she had done when she turned down the still-unnamed role.
"That is a thing you learn getting older; people care so much less about you than you think," Damon quipped, to which she added, "It's so liberating when you're just like, 'nobody cares.'"
