Director Michael Showalter Talks Making ‘Unhinged’ Verity With Fellow New Jerseyan Anne Hathaway

Anne Hathaway and director Michael Showalter have become one of the most fruitful pairings in Hollywood.

The New Jersey talents just topped the box office with Verity, their second film together. Hathaway stars as Verity Crawford, a successful novelist with a secret in the erotic psychological thriller based on Colleen Hoover’s bestselling novel.

After Verity survives an accident that leaves her unresponsive, her husband Jeremy, played by Josh Hartnett, hires Lowen Ashleigh, a ghostwriter played by Dakota Johnson, to complete her work. But in studying Verity’s notes, Lowen discovers a shocking narrative the author wrote about her own life. When the credits roll, audiences are left wondering who to believe.

“My great hope is that people are talking about it and are debating it and are having opinions about it, whatever that is,” says Showalter, who grew up in Princeton. “I very much felt in making the movie: This is the kind of movie that everyone should feel some type of way about … To me, that’s what good movies are.”

Verity, released October 2, is the director’s first film to open at No. 1. 

Showalter, 56, started as a sketch comedy writer and actor, but over the last decade, he has become quite the filmmaker in demand. He directed Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan in their Oscar-nominated movie The Big Sick (2017), Jessica Chastain in her Oscar-winning performance as televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye (2021) and Amanda Seyfried in her Emmy-winning performance as Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the 2022 Hulu series The Dropout.

Showalter’s work with Hathaway, who grew up in Millburn, has proven particularly effective at drawing in audiences.

Verity, from Amazon MGM Studios, had a $32 million domestic opening and has grossed $113.9 million worldwide as of October 11. Before that, Showalter and Hathaway’s 2024 film The Idea of You, which debuted as a Prime Video streaming release, became Amazon’s most successful original rom-com, with almost 50 million views in the first two weeks. The movie, based on the book by Robinne Lee and scripted by Showalter and Jennifer Westfeldt, stars Hathaway in a May-December romance. The Oscar winner, who produced the film with Showalter, plays an art gallery owner and single mom opposite Nicholas Galitzine as a younger boy band singer. That same year, Showalter and Jordana Mollick, his producing partner at Semi-Formal Productions, inked a first-look deal with Amazon.

Showalter’s upcoming slate of Amazon films includes new takes on the 2001 rom-com Serendipity and the 1987 Diane Keaton movie Baby Boom, plus a Cyrano de Bergerac-inspired movie about a pop songwriter.

An ‘Unhinged’ Thrill Ride with Anne Hathaway

Verity is the kind of popcorn movie that has people gasping and talking to the screen. It’s less about finding answers than the thrill of the ride. 

“It’s a vibe; it’s kind of unhinged,” Showalter says of the film, written by Nick Antosca. “I was just like, ‘I want to make a movie that feels provocative.’ And like, ‘I’m not even sure how I feel about this book.’ A lot of people say that when they read the book … That’s kind of a little bit how I wanted people to come away from this. That’s a certain kind of theatrical experience that I think has a lot of value.”

Showalter’s track record includes comedy, dramedy, rom-com and biopic drama. “Erotic psychological thriller” was new territory for him. “I mean, I just love those kinds of movies,” he says. “I grew up loving Alfred Hitchcock movies and all of the great thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s, the Adrian Lyne films and the Joe Eszterhas movies. It was such a big genre when I was at my sort of peak viewing age. All those movies are just really ingrained in me, and they’re very cinematic. They’re entertaining. They’re great roles for movie stars and great costumes, and there’s just a lot of Hollywood kind of razzle-dazzle to it as a genre. And then, of course, it just always has a great propulsive kind of mystery plot to it that kind of keeps you hooked. I just thought the story of Verity felt very original to me and sort of unusual, like something I hadn’t seen before, and I just got really excited about it.”

Verity is Hathaway’s fifth movie this year and her third film of 2026 to debut at No. 1. Her jam-packed release calendar has made her hard to miss: She could be seen in A24’s Mother Mary in the spring, box-office giants The Devil Wears Prada 2 (20th Century Studios/Disney) in May and The Odyssey (Universal Pictures) in July, then The End of Oak Street (Warner Bros.) in August before the release of Showalter’s thriller.

Much of Hathaway’s role in Verity consists of flashback scenes imagined by Johnson’s character as she reads Verity’s writing. “She’s leaning in and she’s having fun with it,” says Showalter, who produced the film with Hathaway and Hoover. 

“I think we both enjoy the work and enjoy the challenge of trying to make something really good, and are both collaborative and interested in bouncing ideas off of each other,” he says of his movies with Hathaway, 43. “We’re very much kind of partners—she makes me a better director, and hopefully I make her a better actor. And I think, also, we just like each other … There’s a lot of trust and a lot of mutual admiration and affection … I like her as a person, and I think maybe the feelings are mutual.”

While Verity takes place partly in New York and mostly in a remote Vermont home, Hathaway’s character in The Idea of You, Solène Marchand, is from New Jersey, like the actor herself. “Anne likes to say that she’s from Brooklyn,” Showalter says. Hathaway was born in New York and lived there as a child before moving with her family to Millburn, where she attended Wyoming Elementary School and graduated from Millburn High School in 2000.  

“I was born and raised in New Jersey; I’m a Jersey boy through and through,” Showalter says. “I do think that there’s a Jersey vibe, and I do think that Anne and I share some of that. I’m not exactly sure what it is, but I always know anytime I meet somebody, I’ll get a feeling—‘Oh, they’re from New Jersey’—and I’ll ask them, ‘Where are you from?’ And like, nine times out of 10, they’re from New Jersey.”

From Movies in Princeton to Wet Hot American Summer

Growing up in the Garden State is “not the suburbs of, like, a Steven Spielberg movie or something,” Showalter says.

“It’s a different kind of suburban upbringing,” he says of his childhood sandwiched between New York and Philadelphia. Showalter is an alum of Princeton High School (and his fellow alum Damien Chazelle in 2016 became the youngest person to win the Oscar for best director for his work in La La Land). As a kid, Showalter frequented the Princeton Garden Theatre and former AMC multiplex at Quaker Bridge Mall in Lawrenceville. 

“My parents were taking me to see R-rated movies when I was pretty young,” he recalls. But he did some of his most prolific viewing via VHS. “My friends and I would rent movies on the weekends, horror movies and weird indie movies and cult movies,” he says. “And then by the time I got into college, I’m just renting every movie I could find because I’d seen everything. And so, for me, my film education came largely through rentals.”

Showalter didn’t start out with big dreams of making movies. College sketch comedy was his entry to the business. “I visited my sister where she went to college [at Yale], and there was an improv group,” he says. “And I saw the improv group, and I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do … When I get to college, I wanna be in a comedy group.’ And that was probably my first sort of real articulated thought about, ‘This is something I’d like to actually do.’ But even then, it was only … something that I would do in college as an extracurricular activity. Growing up in Princeton, New Jersey, going into the entertainment industry isn’t really something that you do.”

His parents worked in academia. His mother, feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter, was a professor at Princeton University; his father, English Showalter, was a professor of French literature at Rutgers. The future director joined sketch and improv groups as a student at New York University, then Brown University. As part of The State, a sketch group from NYU, he starred in the early ’90s MTV series of the same name. He later cowrote and appeared in the film Wet Hot American Summer (2001), which boasts an all-star comedy cast and gained a devoted fandom over the years. This August, a rerelease of the ’80s-set summer-camp romp marked its 25th anniversary. Showalter also worked on Netflix’s Wet Hot American Summer prequel and sequel series in 2015 and 2017. 

When Showalter made the original movie in 2000 with cowriter and director David Wain—a fellow member of The State—he didn’t yet see himself as a potential movie director. “I think at that time, I wanted to be a funny leading man,” he says. “I wanted to be in a romantic comedy playing, like, the main guy.” 

Director in Demand

Showalter says his shift to directing played out organically after he moved away from acting. 

He feels directing is “not just what I’m best at, but it’s also what’s most real for me,” noting that it’s “such a difficult career to actually succeed at. There’s no real path for it. I mean, you can go to grad school, obviously, but to have a real career as a director is a pretty scary thing to want to try to do, I think. You need a lot of help … I had long ago figured out that acting wasn’t going to be my path, and I was sort of in the back of my mind thinking, ‘I’d love to direct; that’s what I think I would be good at’—but the opportunities weren’t really there for me. And so I mostly was focusing on writing, and felt like, even now, ‘I can always fall back on writing a movie, writing a screenplay, maybe writing a play.’”

Showalter made his feature directorial debut in the 2005 comedy The Baxter. He wrote, helmed and starred in the movie alongside Wet Hot American Summer alums Elizabeth Banks and Paul Rudd, as well as Michelle Williams and Justin Theroux. However, he considers his big break as a director to be his second feature, Hello, My Name is Doris, a 2015 romantic comedy starring Sally Field. The film, which he cowrote with Laura Terruso, was “the first thing I did that people saw and liked, and that did well,” he says. “That came really late in my career. I was well into my 40s by the time I had made that movie, and so my journey to this place has been very long and winding.” 

Showalter now lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Anne Kalin Ellis, and their twin daughters. When he first moved from Brooklyn to LA, he assumed he’d be a TV writer. He cocreated series like Search Party and the short-lived Michael & Michael Have Issues with Michael Ian Black, but the film with Field set him on a different trajectory. “That kind of changed everything,” he says. “Doris led to The Big Sick, and that really did change my career.” 

The Big Sick, a story based on the real-life romance between Kumail Nanjiani and his wife, Emily V. Gordon, earned the duo an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay. Years later, Showalter directed Jessica Chastain to her first best actress Oscar in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. Chastain played the mascara-clumped televangelist Tammy Faye Bakker in the 2021 biopic opposite Andrew Garfield as Tammy’s then-husband Jim Bakker. (The film also won the Oscar for makeup and hairstyling.) While Tammy, who was later known as Tammy Faye Messner, died in 2007, Jim died just last week. “He did not see the movie, that I’m aware of,” Showalter says. “But both of his children definitely saw the movie and were consulted with and talked to. And I don’t know how they felt about the movie—I think they had very mixed feelings.”

Showalter also directed the 2022 film Spoiler Alert, starring Jim Parsons and Ben Aldridge in an adaptation of the memoir from Roselle Park’s own Michael Ausiello. The writer told of his romance with his late husband, photographer Kit Cowan, who died of cancer. 

Later, Showalter worked with Dominic Sessa, a young Jersey actor on the rise (The Holdovers; Tony; Now You See Me: Now You Don’t), in the 2025 Christmas movie Oh. What. Fun. (Amazon MGM Studios) starring Michelle Pfeiffer as an unappreciated mother. Sessa, 23, who grew up in Egg Harbor Township and Ocean City, played her son in the film. 

“He’s a sweet guy,” Showalter says of Sessa. “He’s just an incredibly hardworking kid—super talented. Loved working with him and hope I get a chance to work with him again in the future.”