Anne Hathaway talks of 'Love and Other Drugs'

NEW YORK  – Anne Hathaway teams up again in romantic comedy drama "Love and Other Drugs" with her "Brokeback Mountain" co-star Jake Gyllenhaal.

Her performance as Maggie, an sexually overt free spirit who meets a pharmaceutical sales rep and finds herself surprisingly falling in love, has garnered Oscar talk heading into the Hollywood awards season.

Hathaway, 28, talked about the film -- based on the nonfiction book, "Hard Sell: The Evolution of a Viagra Salesman" -- about topics ranging from pharmaceuticals to the movie's main drug: love.

Q: How much has changed in both yours and Jake's lives since 'Brokeback Mountain'?

A: "Gosh, I think everything except for our families and friends have changed in our lives since then. We are basically the same people, just older and wiser."

Q: Apparently in shooting this movie, you cried every day?

A: "I did, I had a bit of a roller coaster experience on this movie...I was playing a character way out of my comfort zone. All that overt sexuality is just not me."

Q: Your character has Parkinson's disease, is emotionally complex and not a typically one-dimensional female romantic comedy character. Is that what appealed to you in the script?

A: "The script that I was sent was a story about a man who was changed by the love of a woman. And the script that we wound up making is a story of two people who are changed by love. What I brought to it was probably a sense of entitlement, that my character ought to have emotional parity with Jake's."

Q: Were the sex scenes the most exposed you have been?

"It's weird to think of one sex scene being exposed more than the other, because it's all the same bits. But I think they were the most involved sex scenes I have ever done, yes."

Q: How difficult was it?

A: "We didn't want to lose the film's energy in these scenes. And I think that is what resulted in the film. It's less of nudity and more of intimacy."

Q: How did you try to not overplay the Parkinson's tremor?

A: "I researched it. I spoke with people who have it at different stages of their diagnosis. About how I got the physical, I watched a lot of videos on YouTube.

"There was always an awareness to keep it authentic . . . we had to be really specific about when her symptoms manifested themselves and when they didn't."