Anne Hathaway says she missed out on roles due to ‘toxic’ Hathahate backlash

Anne Hathaway rose above the “Hathahate” with a little help from Christopher Nolan.

The “Idea of You” star, 41, posed for the April cover of Vanity Fair and spoke to the outlet in an interview published Monday, revealing that even after winning an Oscar in 2013, she missed out on roles due to online negativity that surrounded her.

“A lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online,” she said.

Hathaway was referring to backlash she received in the early 2010s, when social media users labeled her “annoying” in reaction to her outward sincerity and passion for acting. The phenomenon known as “Hathahate” was especially prominent in 2013 after Hathaway won an Oscar for “Les Misérables” and declared in her acceptance speech, in a reference to the film’s song “I Dreamed a Dream,” “It came true.”

 

Around this time, Nolan cast Hathaway in his 2014 sci-fi film “Interstellar,” which she described as a godsend amid the period of negativity. Hathaway previously played Catwoman in Nolan’s “The Dark Knight Rises” in 2012.

“I had an angel in Christopher Nolan, who did not care about that and gave me one of the most beautiful roles I’ve had in one of the best films that I’ve been a part of,” Hathaway told Vanity Fair. “I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time, but it had that effect.”

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She added, “And my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.”

Hathaway previously addressed the online backlash against her during Elle’s Women in Hollywood event in October 2022, saying she looked at “the language of hatred from a new perspective” during this time.

“This was a language I had employed with myself since I was 7,” she said, per Elle. “And when your self-inflicted pain is suddenly somehow amplified back at you at, say, the full volume of the internet … It’s a thing.”

Speaking to Ellen DeGeneres in 2014, Hathaway also recalled being upset after coming across an article titled “Why Does Everybody Hate Anne Hathaway?” She said she had difficulty ignoring this online hatred because she “hadn’t learned to love myself yet.”

“If you don’t love yourself, when someone else says horrible things to you, a part of you’s always going to believe them,” she added. “So then it was like, ‘Okay, I don’t want to believe these people. I don’t want to agree with them on any level. I’m going to figure out who I am.’”

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In the Vanity Fair interview, Hathaway shared the advice she would give to a young person about encountering online hate. “I want to hug them, make them tea and tell them to live as long and as well as they can,” she told the outlet in an email. “That there is an excellent chance that the longer they live, the smaller this moment will feel. That I wish them a life a million times more fascinating than this terrible moment.”

Anne Hathaway was told she had no sex appeal when she started in Hollywood

Hathaway, who posed in a corset for Vanity Fair’s photo shoot and appeared on the cover wearing a black bra, revealed in another portion of the interview that she was told she had no sex appeal when she started in Hollywood, although she never believed this was true. “I’m a Scorpio,” she said. “I know what I’m like on a Saturday night.”