To build a convincing pop star from scratch, the creative team behind A24’s Mother Mary spent six months doing what the music industry typically takes a decade to accomplish. The film, now in limited release, stars Anne Hathaway as a fictional arena-filling icon named Mother Mary — and the work required to make that character credible onscreen went far beyond acting.
Choreographer Dani Vitale describes the process as “10 years of artist development in six months,” covering everything from mapping out a career timeline to figuring out what the character’s album rollout would look like. The team needed answers to questions that most films never ask: how long had this pop star been performing, what was her aesthetic evolution, and what made audiences believe in her enough to fill stadiums?
Hathaway trained six to seven hours a day for months in jazz, ballet, and hip hop so that, once production began, she could absorb any choreographic direction immediately. Even during lunch breaks, Vitale had her watching award shows, studying tours and music videos, and learning how to hold a microphone convincingly. The goal was specific: erase the actress and replace her with someone who looked like she had been performing her whole life.
Director David Lowery drew heavily on Taylor Swift as a reference point, describing Mother Mary as what a Swift-like figure might look like in ten or fifteen years. For the film’s concert sequences, cinematographer Rina Yang — who has worked on music videos for Swift, FKA Twigs, and Haim — brought her arena-tour experience to bear, live-directing camera movement alongside the music to create a fluid, organic energy.
Lowery recruited Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs to write and produce a full album’s worth of goth-inspired industrial pop songs for the character. Hathaway performed them all herself. “We wanted her to be somebody the audience believed could have held her own against these pop icons and goddesses for the last 20 years,” she told reporters at the New York premiere.
Costume designer Bina Daigeler built the character’s wardrobe across two decades of fictional career history, with each era growing progressively more extravagant — culminating in bedazzled bodysuits, knee-high stilettos, and towering gothic halos that Hathaway rehearsed wearing to ensure she could dance in them during filming.
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The film opened April 17 and currently holds a 71 percent approval rating among critics. Reviews have split sharply: IndieWire called it “singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound,” while other critics found Lowery’s supernatural ambitions muddled. The film runs 112 minutes and co-stars Michaela Coel as Sam Anselm, a fashion designer whose estrangement from the pop star forms the dramatic core of the story.
