Anne Hathaway recently sat down for an interview with Jezebel while promoting her new movie Colossal, where she talked about having haters. Here are some highlights:
Earlier this year you’d announced that you were taking a break from social media, and you’ve been posting less.
"It’s funny because with this movie, I’ve been asked to up my social media... thing. I’ve been shooting a lot of dumb videos all day. Just silly little things, they don’t really say anything. I’m going to post them on Instagram stories, but I’m not going to post them to my Instagram. I’m happy to post them on Instagram Stories, because I feel like I can be a little freer and a little looser, but the Instagram stuff... it’s going to stick around for as long as anybody cares to look for what is there.
I might be inviting some criticism by mentioning this, but when have I ever not invited criticism? [Laughs] When has any public figure ever not? But I had never posted a photo of my son, and I decided to post a shot of the back of his head, and almost as soon as I’d done it, I wished that I hadn’t. I felt like I had broken some kind of a seal in inviting people into my life. And even though I felt as though I had done it in as protective a way as I could, even though it was a moment I was incredibly proud of, I don’t know that I’ll ever do it again. I’m a big believer that you gotta mess things up sometimes to really see them properly, so if I made a mistake or I messed up, I know how I feel about it much better now. 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."
I wonder what you thought about Gloria (her character in Colossal) being an internet writer, given the way you have been talked about on the internet. You’ve talked about it hurting your feelings. Was it a mode of empathy to play someone who could have potentially written, “Everybody Hates Anne Hathaway” four years ago?
"It’s very interesting to be talking to you about it, because I love your site, but for a while I had to stop reading it because 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. 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 if you didn’t want to look at it from that vantage point, it just seemed like a very timely profession for someone like her to be doing. Like just about everything in this movie, it resonated on several levels."
I thought that conversation was overblown. I think it originated from a place like, “Here’s this wonderfully talented A-list actor, we can take her down a peg,” and then it got to be such a thing that you became an underdog. And maybe that mechanism is why we don’t really hear that conversation anymore. I mean, how much have you thought about this? It’s weird to talk about, right?
"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. 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. But I’m also not in the driver’s seat of this interview. But I do appreciate the things that you say. That’s a kind way of interpreting it."
Did it change you at all? Did that conversation change the way you thought about your image or choices you make? How much did you internalize it?
"Um... it made the pause before I answer this question a lot longer. I was just reading [Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview] at lunch, and she said, I’m going to paraphrase it right now, “I don’t try to change other people—it’s so much easier to change yourself.” 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."
Read the full interview at Jezebel.
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