Anne Hathaway Says Verity’s Most Unhinged Sex Scene Was Non-Negotiable

Somewhere in the Amazon MGM Studios production office, there is apparently a small graveyard of wooden headboard fragments. Anne Hathaway has seen it. Josh Hartnett has seen it. Dakota Johnson may have personally contributed to it. And if you have read Colleen Hoover’s Verity, you already know why.

In a joint interview with E! News, Hathaway revealed that the upcoming film adaptation kept one of the novel’s most bizarrely specific moments intact: the scene in which Lowen Ashleigh bites a headboard to muffle the sound of her orgasm. Not a toned-down version. Not a tasteful cutaway. The headboard bit is staying in the movie, because apparently there are some literary details Hollywood can change only at its own peril.

“There’re certain things, like, Verity can be a brunette, but we can’t mess up the headboard bit,” Hathaway said. “We have to get that right, because it’s too specific and unusual.”

That sentence is the entire Verity experience in miniature: glossy, lurid, slightly deranged and very confident that the strangest thing in the room deserves top billing.

The headboard has entered the chat

For anyone who missed the 2018 novel’s particular brand of domestic nightmare, Verity follows Lowen, a struggling writer hired to finish the bestselling series of Verity Crawford, a famous author left comatose after a car accident. Lowen moves into the Crawford family home, where she finds Verity’s unfinished autobiography and begins uncovering secrets that are considerably more alarming than the average writer’s block.

She also becomes romantically involved with Verity’s husband, Jeremy Crawford, which is where the headboard makes its unforgettable entrance. In the book, Jeremy performs oral sex on Lowen while she attempts to keep quiet by biting the wood. The detail is so oddly concrete that it has become one of the novel’s signature moments—not necessarily because it is romantic, but because it feels like the kind of thing you would tell a friend about with the urgent tone usually reserved for airport scandals.

Hartnett, who plays Jeremy, did not have to leave his own dental signature on the props. He did, however, see the evidence of his costars’ labor. “I remember going through the prop table at one point and seeing like a series of different pieces of the headboard with different bites on them,” he said, teasing Johnson and Hathaway that they “must have sat there for a while” biting each prop.

Hathaway’s response to the whole ordeal was wonderfully matter-of-fact: “I never thought I’d bite a headboard on camera in my life, but that was just a Tuesday.” It is hard to imagine a more Hathaway sentence—part glamorous movie-star anecdote, part exhausted office update.

Hollywood can change the hair. Not the chaos.

The funny thing about adaptations is that fans will forgive a lot until you alter the one detail they have mentally highlighted, underlined and discussed in a group chat. Hathaway knows that the film cannot reproduce every reader’s private image of the Crawford estate, the characters or the novel’s atmosphere. But some changes are more combustible than others.

“The house might not look exactly the way in your head when you read the book,” she said. “For a lot of people, Verity is a blonde. So, you just kind of hope that people will go with your version of it and let it be its own thing.”

That is the adaptation bargain: the blonde can become a brunette, the imagined house can acquire an entirely new staircase, and the sleepwalking sequence can be reduced to a fragment. But once you have promised the audience the headboard, you had better deliver the headboard.

Johnson explained that only a snippet of Lowen’s sleepwalking made the final cut, despite the production shooting more elaborate material, including moments in which Lowen ends up outside. Her reasoning was blunt and sensible: “It’s just not necessarily that interesting to watch someone sleepwalk.” A disturbing paragraph can thrive in a book. On screen, someone wandering around unconscious for several minutes risks becoming an expensive screensaver.

The headboard, by contrast, has built-in cinematic stakes. It is physical, absurd and instantly legible. It also tells you everything about the movie’s tone: this is a psychological romantic thriller, yes, but one that is not above letting a piece of furniture become a supporting character.

Anne, Dakota and Josh are a very glossy nightmare

The cast is doing some unusually elegant heavy lifting here. Hathaway plays Verity Crawford, the bestselling author whose body is unresponsive but whose influence hangs over the house like a perfume no one can identify. Johnson plays Lowen, the outsider pulled into the family’s secrets. Hartnett plays Jeremy, the husband at the center of the emotional and erotic triangle.

All three are also producers on the film, giving the adaptation a little more creative ownership than a standard star vehicle. Hathaway and director Michael Showalter previously worked together on The Idea of You, while Johnson’s production company TeaTime Pictures grew out of her interest in finding and developing material with the same immersive pull she looks for as a reader.

Johnson has described her reading habits as a willingness to “fall down the rabbit hole every time,” and Verity is very much a rabbit hole with expensive lighting. Its appeal is not simply the mystery of whether Verity’s writings are true. It is the sensation that every new discovery makes the house feel more intimate, more glamorous and less safe.

That combination may explain why the cast announcement generated such immediate enthusiasm from Hoover’s audience. When Johnson’s casting was revealed in December 2024, fans were, in E!’s memorable phrasing, “fifty shades of tickled pink.” Hoover later called her excitement about the cast “an understatement.” The author is also involved as a producer, alongside Hathaway, Johnson, Showalter and others.

The movie is keeping the spirit—and the splinters

Filming took place from January through March 2025, with Hathaway and Hartnett photographed working on scenes in Queens. Hathaway was later seen in a semi-sheer white dress, matching belt, sunglasses and leopard-print heels; Hartnett wore a navy suit in one sequence and a bow tie in another. Elsewhere, the pair were photographed smiling and running while Hathaway carried his jacket, which sounds less like a thriller setup than a very expensive argument at a wedding.

Hathaway said the first audience response brought relief to the team, particularly because they felt viewers understood what they were trying to preserve. “They thought that we got the spirit of the book correct,” she said.

That spirit, judging by the details the cast chose to discuss, is not solemn literary prestige. It is the deliciously unstable feeling that a beautiful house may contain a terrible secret, a manuscript may be a confession or a trap, and a sex scene may require multiple sacrificial props.

Verity is scheduled to arrive in theaters Oct. 2, 2026. Until then, the central question is not whether the film will recreate every image readers carried from the book. It is whether audiences will accept Hathaway as a brunette, survive the Crawford estate and recognize the exact moment when a headboard becomes plot.

One thing is clear: Hollywood may rearrange the furniture. It may streamline the sleepwalking. It may ask everyone to adjust their mental picture of Verity Crawford. But the woodwork has been warned.