Anne Hathaway won an Oscar. Then her career took a turn for the worse.
The actress says in a new profile that co-hosting the 2013 Oscars and taking home the honor for best supporting actress for Les Misérables marked a tipping point where her online and media reputation turned “toxic” — to the point where she says it cost her movie roles.
The viral phenomenon dubbed “Hathahate” had no actual cause, other than the actress enjoying a surge in exposure and popularity that got her dubbed “annoying” by some, taking her from It Girl to Not-It Girl thanks to some online backlash.
After winning the Oscar, Hathaway told Vanity Fair, “a lot of people wouldn’t give me roles, because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online.”
Then director Christopher Nolan came along, casting her in his blockbuster film Interstellar (2014).
“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,” she said of Nolan casting her in the Matthew McConaughey-led space epic. (She also starred in Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises in 2012.) “I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time, but it had that effect. And my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.”
She added, “Humiliation is such a rough thing to go through. 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…
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