Despite her continuing success, actress Anne Hathaway is just now stepping back into Hollywood after a year-long hiatus.

“My impression is that people needed a break from me,” she laughed in an interview with Huffington Post.

After winning an Academy Award for her role in the 2013 film musical Les Miserables, Hathaway made the decision to take a step away due to the weight of the attention, both positive and negative, she was receiving.

“This fame thing? F–ked me up for a really long time,” the 31-year-old told Elle UK. “I didn’t know how to do it; I didn’t know how to engage with it; it stressed me out. And people would say, ‘You just have to be yourself,’ and I was like, ‘But I don’t know who that is yet!'”

But now Hathaway is gearing up for the release of Christopher Nolan’s new sci-fi film, Interstellar, which follows a team of space travelers who travel through a wormhole. Matthew McConaughey also stars alongside Hathaway.

“The man speaks in poetry,” Hathaway said of McConaughey. “I remember once while we were filming, something got screwed up, and he said to me: ‘Look, we can get upset about this, or we can go with it and have a great story for the rest of our lives.'”

Hathaway, who also focused on her marriage to Adam Shulman during her time off, now says she is ready to step back into the limelight, critics be damned.

“I’ve realized that don’t need validation from anybody. At all. I’m not sitting here now worrying, ‘What do you think of me?’ With all due respect, you seem like a lovely lady, but I don’t need you, or anyone else, to like me. And that’s so liberating. It’s a big reveal, man.”

Along with Interstellar, which hits theaters on November 7, Hathaway can also be seen in Song One, which recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. However, despite the title, she doesn’t sing.

“No, no. And it’s a very different film than [Les Miserables], but I don’t play a singer or a musician – I play an anthropologist.”