Anne Hathaway thought she'd 'die of hypothermia' filming Interstellar wearing leaky space suit

The actress found herself going all numb and tingly while submerged in cold water

Anne Hathaway got into cold water during filming of Christopher Nolan's Interstellar (Rex Features)

Les Miserables star Anne Hathaway feared she was going to die of hypothermia while filming Christopher Nolan’s £110m space epic Interstellar.

The actress, 31, who plays one of four astronauts on a mission to find another inhabitable galaxy, came a cropper while filming in freezing waters wearing a leaky space suit.

“It was a scene where my character becomes submerged in water and trapped, so I go down in the water expecting it’s probably not going to be warm but I will at least be dry,” Hathaway said in an interview with The Telegraph.

“But after about 10 seconds the suit is totally full of water. I don’t know what’s happening or why, but everybody is hurting and cold so I don’t say anything about it and wonder, ‘How long can this last?’”

The actress said her body became all numb, tingly and said everything became hazy around the edges. She said: “II thought Chris is going to be way more annoyed if I die of hypothermia than he is if I speak up about it and maybe delay filming for five minutes.”

Hathaway said she was reluctant to complain to Nolan – director of Inception and the Dark Knight trilogy – because “Wimps don’t last long on his set.”

The film, co-written by Nolan’s brother Jonah, has been kept under wraps until last weekend when a select number of critics were invited to review it. The film was even codenamed “Flora’s Letter” to help maintain secrecy on set.

The story is somewhere between a John Steinbeck novel on futuristic Earth that has suffered a 1930s style “dust bowl” catastrophe and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In it Matthew McConaughey plays a widowed engineer who agrees to captain a mission through a wormhole in search of other worlds for the human race to populate. Jessica Chastain and Michael Caine are among the other big names to feature, and Matt Damon makes a cameo.

Critics have already hailed the three hour-long film the next enduring sci-fi classic and it is already being tipped for the best picture category at next year’s Oscars, following in the footsteps of last year’s intergalactic film Gravity.