Anne Hathaway’s ‘Prada’ training for Catwoman

Anne Hathaway’s ‘Prada’ training for Catwoman

By Bryan Alexander, USA TODAY
2012/7/8
Playing Selina Kyle (better known as Catwoman) in The Dark Knight Rises requires some serious acrobatic fighting in perilous high heels.

Thank the fashion gods Anne Hathaway had training when she starred in The Devil Wears Prada.

Hathaway credited her breakout role as a magazine editor assistant in 2006's Prada as fundamental training her for the required action in Dark Knight. It gave her the leg up on the skills needed to kick right alongside Batman (Christian Bale).

"The Devil Wears Prada was really good training for that," Hathaway said at a press conference on Sunday. "I kind of ran all up and down Manhattan then. Now I just ran up and
down Gotham."

"It's just part of being a woman," she adds of the heel work. "You figure it out."

Hathaway says she was not pressured to look good in her skin-tight leather cat suit for the role. But she was expected to train to do her own fighting.

"I felt very lucky," Hathaway said. "Sometimes there's a mandate that comes to you, a deal of how you have to look. The way I was treated on this movie was 'Learn how to do what you need to do. And then, however you look that's the way the character looks.' "

"I felt as a woman, very protected that way," she adds.