The dominant narrative after Anne Hathaway won a 2013 Academy Award for her performance in “Les Misérables” was that she was ... kind of a monster. One bred by Hollywood with the audacity to “pretend [she] was happy” while the world jeered on as she made one acceptance speech after another.
Well, now that she’s actually playing a monster in her new sci-fi movie “Colossal,” let alone one that has a day job as an internet writer, Hathaway is opening up about being the target of such collective and ― let’s be honest ― unfounded criticism.
Speaking with Jezebel for an in-depth interview about “Colossal” and her career since her Oscar win, the actress revealed that she’s still forced to answer questions about what the internet thinks of her in almost every interview, four years later.
“I think it’s weird that it continues to be talked about a little bit. I understand in the context of this movie, why it should be brought up. But it comes up in every interview I do, just about,” Hathaway explained. “I am ... not eager, but I am ready for the conversation to move to a place beyond it. I don’t have to contextualize all of my stories, all of my experiences through that time. I’m ready for it to be implied, not overtly stated.”
During the peak-Hathahate era, the 34-year-old star admits she would sometimes stumble across less-than-flattering articles about herself, even on sites like Jezebel, when she wasn’t seeking it out.
“I would just be reading about something totally unrelated to me and [see] a headline about me and how much your site dislikes me or whoever was writing it dislikes me would come up. That would catch me off-guard. Now, it’s not that I’ve gotten a rhino skin to it, but I sort of see all of that for what it is.”
Hathaway knows she’s not perfect and has never aspired to be. That’s why her biggest takeaway from her period of public scrutiny was to look inward instead of give feeding the negativity with more attention.
“How the world feels about me has nothing to do with me. How other people treat me has nothing to do with me,” she continued. “But if anything that anybody said resonated with me as something I’d like to work on for myself, I took it in like that. And to that extent, I feel like I got to shortcut a lot of my growth. To that extent, even though I wouldn’t have chosen to go through it, I still found a way to be grateful to it.”
To read Hathaway’s full interview, head over to Jezebel.
