BEVERLY HILLS—It’s hard to believe that Anne Hathaway could actually be any more striking in real life than she is on-screen, but there it is. Even sandwiched between Matthew McConaughey and Jessica Chastain at a swish Beverly Hills hotel to promote Christopher Nolan’s epic space odyssey, Interstellar (opening November 7), Hathaway sucks up the attention like an über-fashionable black hole. Appearing in an elaborately lacy number that could have been hanging in Stevie Nicks’s wardrobe about 40 years ago, the actor promptly sits down to discuss a three-hour movie in which she’s encased, for the most part, ironically enough, inside a 40-pound space suit.

“The first time I put it on, I made up my mind that it’s my favourite costume that I’ve ever worn,” she says. “It was the closest I ever felt to feeling like a kid at Halloween, if you can stretch Halloween out for several months. And I love that feeling.”

She’s possibly making the best of a bad situation here. At a postscreening Q & A in Hollywood the previous night, Hathaway recalled watching the sun go down from the surface of a remote glacier in Iceland after completing an especially demanding sequence for Nolan in that damn suit—or so she thought.

“I just start to feel my entire spirit start to soar,” she gushed, “and I thank the sunset, and I thank Iceland, and I thank the elves, and I was like, ‘We did it! God, we got through it!’ ” After take number 20? “It was the same damn sky and the same damn everything and I just could not give a shit,” she said.

All extreme conditions and horrendous physical exertions aside, Hathaway clearly feels there’s something important about Interstellar. The film imagines, with very little exertion, sadly, an increasingly uninhabitable Earth and the secret effort by what’s left of NASA to find a new home planet. At the same conference, coscripter Jonathan Nolan cracks everybody up when he laments the scaled-back American space program.

“If you charted our evolution as a species in terms of altitude, we peaked in 1973,” he says. “You’re promised jet packs and then you get Instagram. Kind of a bum deal.”

Picking up the thread, Hathaway says she first encountered our off-planet ambitions in the seventh grade, when she was involved in a memorial to the space shuttle Challenger.

“My class spent the entire school year preparing to launch a spaceship, all together, and we all had our different jobs that we learned how to do, and we learned the math that you needed, we learned the practical skills that you needed, and I thought that was really cool,” she says. “And so I think that if you take a tragedy and find the gold in it and turn it into something positive, that’s great, and I’m hoping that this suspension of the space program is just that: a suspension, and that it’s not the final say in the matter. ’Cause I think we need it.”