Director Director David Lowery called Mother Mary, his upcoming movie, “a weird, weird film.” That makes sense, given that A24 is distributing and they’re known for pushing the envelope in the name of creativity.
Lowery has some great partners to help bring this vision to life: Anne Hathaway plays a larger-than-life pop star who has a tense reunion with a former friend and costume designer played by Michaela Coel. The movie doesn’t skimp on the musical elements, as Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs contribute music to the film, while Twigs also has an acting role.
Ahead of the movie’s release, keep reading for everything you need to know before it hits theaters.
Plot
The logline reads, “Long-buried wounds rise to the surface when iconic pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel) on the eve of her comeback performance.”
While speaking at the Australian Centre For The Moving Image in 2024 (as IndieWire notes), Lowery said the movie is “a weird, weird film” and continued:
“I wrote the first 20 pages when I was shooting Peter Pan And Wendy and it’s been percolating ever since. That movie was huge, it was one of the greatest shoots of my life and one of the hardest edits of my life and it inspired a lot of soul searching. After that, I decided I’m just going to do something simple. I need to do a movie with just two actors in a room having a long heart to heart, […] a really gentle filmmaking experience.
But then I thought, ‘What if one of those characters is a pop star? And what if we started at a stadium? Then it got bigger [laughs]. And again, it wound up being the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Cast
The movie stars Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, Atheena Frizzell, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Alba Baptista, Isaura Barbé-Brown, Sian Clifford, and FKA Twigs.
Hathaway told Vogue of preparing for the film:
“What struck me right away, reading the script, is that you can’t ‘perform’ Mother Mary. If I got the part, I would have to become material David could craft with. […] I had to submit to being a beginner. The humility of that — showing up every day knowing you’re going to suck. And it has to be okay. You’re not ‘bad.’ You’re just a beginner. Getting to that mindset — I had to shed some things that were hard to shed. It was welcome. But it was hard, the way transformational experiences can be hard.”
Release Date
The film is set to hit theaters in April 2026.
Trailer
Watch the Mother Mary trailer below.