Anne Hathaway On Internet Hate: 'It Has Nothing To Do With Me'
For years, one of the Internet's favorite targets for irrational hate was Anne Hathaway. Even on this site, the subject of so-called "Hathahate" has been discussed in more than one article.
And though the Internet has since turned it's gaze from hating on Hathaway, the subject is once again in the spotlight due to the Oscar-winning actress' latest role. In her new film, Colossal, Hathaway plays Gloria, an Internet writer having a mid-life crisis.
In a long-ranging interview with Jezebel, Hathaway talked at length about the effect the period of "Internet hate" had on her.
When asked about her guarded social media presence, Hathaway described her wariness to use things like Instagram because "it's going to stick around for as long as anybody cares to look for what is there." She also said, "Instagram, when I first started, it was so much fun. And it was a great way to be silly and kind of do things off the cuff. And now, because of the time we live in, I think words and pictures are carrying a much greater weight. Or, much less depending on how you engage with it."
Another question asked Hathaway if she took the role of Gloria, in part, "as a mode of empathy" for the very writers who slammed her in hate pieces. Hathaway said, "As far as Gloria, I thought it could be a positive overlap given my history with that aspect of her life, if you wanted to look at it from that vantage point."
And while she acknowledges that at some point, she stopped reading sites like Jezebel, because she would be "caught off-guard" by unrelated headlines about herself, she's come to a more grounded perspective about the whole thing.
"How the world feels about me has nothing to do with me. How other people treat me has nothing to do with me. 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."
Sounds pretty reasonable to us, but we're sure some part of the Internet will take this as a brand new reason to tear her down.