Anne Hathaway Says She Lost Roles Due to ‘Hathahate’ Bullying Before Christopher Nolan Cast Her in ‘Interstellar’
Anne Hathaway says she lost out on acting opportunities during the mid-2010s when the so-called “Hathahate” movement of online bullying was at an all-time high.
But in a Vanity Fair profile published Monday, the “Idea of You” star reflected that Christopher Nolan, a previous collaborator on “The Dark Knight Rises,” “did not care about that” and in some ways saved her career by casting her again in 2014’s “Interstellar.”
“I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time, but it had that effect,” Hathaway said. “And my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.”
In the sci-fi epic costarring Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, Matt Damon and a young Timothée Chalamet, Hathaway played Dr. Amelia Brand, a NASA scientist and astronaut who joins McConaughey’s Joseph Cooper on their space mission.
The Oscar-winning actress has publicly reflected on that dark period before, saying in a 2022 Women in Hollywood speech for Elle that the bullying — which often vilified her as being cringey and overeager, or of exhibiting “theater kid” energy — “was a language I had employed with myself since I was seven” and that to see her “self-inflicted pain” amplified in the public square of the Internet was “a thing.”
That period, largely centered around her 2011 Oscars hosting gig with James Franco and the 2012 awards campaign for “Les Misérables” that ultimately earned her that year’s Best Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar, also marked a professional low point.
“A lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online,” Hathaway told VF, before revealing the role that Nolan inadvertently played in her image rehabilitation. “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.”
“Humiliation is such a rough thing to go through,” she continued. “The key is to not let it close you down. You have to stay bold, and it can be hard because you’re like, ‘If I stay safe, if I hug the middle, if I don’t draw too much attention to myself, it won’t hurt.’ But if you want to do that, don’t be an actor. You’re a tightrope walker. You’re a daredevil. You’re asking people to invest their time and their money and their attention and their care into you. So you have to give them something worth all of those things. And if it’s not costing you anything, what are you really offering?”
Read Hathaway’s full Vanity Fair cover story here.
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