There are some movie pairings that make you wonder why nobody thought of them sooner. Anne Hathaway and Ewan McGregor are a pretty good example.
They’ve both been doing this for decades. They’ve made enormous studio movies, smaller dramas, musicals, comedies and franchises, yet somehow their paths never crossed on screen. The End of Oak Street finally changes that, and judging by the way Hathaway talks about her co-star, she was more than happy to finally get the chance.
The movie gives them a pretty unusual first project together. Hathaway and McGregor play a married couple when a mysterious event suddenly sends their home and neighborhood into prehistoric times. Whatever problems this family had before that happened haven’t gone away. Now they also have a much bigger one: figuring out how to stay alive when the world outside their front door isn’t the world they went to sleep in.
For all the prehistoric danger surrounding them, though, the movie still needs the family at the center to work. Hathaway clearly felt she had the right person playing opposite her.
Anne Hathaway finally gets to work with Ewan McGregor
Hathaway had admired McGregor’s work long before the two finally ended up on a movie set together. That’s understandable when you look at the career he’s had. He’s gone from intimate character pieces to some of the biggest franchises in the world and made the jump between them look pretty effortless.
Actually working with him gave Hathaway a chance to see another side of that.
She had plenty of good things to say about McGregor as an actor, but what seems to have stayed with her just as much was the person she got to work with every day. The way he approached the job and treated the people around him clearly made an impression.
And with this particular movie, the connection between the two actors matters.
The End of Oak Street can throw all kinds of prehistoric trouble at its characters, but Hathaway and McGregor still have to convince us that these two had a life together before everything went crazy. Their marriage, kids and everyday family problems were already there before the prehistoric chaos began. Ordinary arguments probably felt pretty important at the time, too, right up until their neighborhood ended up millions of years in the past.
If you believe in that family, the danger means more.
The End of Oak Street turns a familiar place upside down
There’s something wonderfully strange about taking one of the safest, most ordinary places imaginable and dropping it somewhere it absolutely doesn’t belong.
Home is supposed to be where you shut the door on whatever is happening outside. In The End of Oak Street, the house is still there. The street is still there. Almost everything beyond it has changed.
That gives Hathaway and McGregor more to play than simply being frightened by whatever is waiting outside. Their characters brought all of their old problems with them. Being transported into prehistoric times doesn’t magically fix a marriage or erase years of family history.
It just makes surviving long enough to deal with any of it a lot more complicated.
That’s where putting these two actors together gets interesting. Both have spent years bouncing between spectacle and smaller character-driven stories, and this movie asks them to do a little of both at once.
Anne Hathaway had plenty to say about her new co-star
After all those years of never working together, Hathaway finally got her chance with McGregor, and she certainly doesn’t sound disappointed by how it turned out.
She’s worked with an awfully impressive list of actors during her career, which makes the enthusiasm she has for McGregor nice to hear. Sometimes you admire somebody’s work from a distance and then finally work with them only to discover the experience isn’t quite what you imagined.
This doesn’t sound like one of those times.
Click on the video below to hear Anne Hathaway talk about working with Ewan McGregor for the first time and why she came away with so much respect for her co-star.
The End of Oak Street is now playing in theaters.
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