Anne Hathaway Responds to Her Critics

Media Platforms Design Team

We've all done it. Watched an awards show—red carpet, speeches, audience reactions—and judged, and judged, and judged. And it's fun, right? Sitting on the couch, captivated by our own cleverness. Occasionally someone comes up with a catchy term, like Brangelina, or Robsten (circa 2010). Or Hathahater. It just trips off the tongue, doesn't it? You could practically trademark it.

The problem is, there's an actual person, Anne Hathaway, at whom this brutally jaunty phrase is directed. A woman who is sincere to a fault, as earnest as quinoa. A woman who is warm and funny, who has a laugh as big as her personality. Hathaway somehow attracted this "hate" during the 2013 awards season (when she won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, for her portrayal of Fantine in Les Misérables) through her perceived inauthenticity, her very actress-ness.

Almost two years later, Hathaway is the first to admit that public speaking isn't her strength. "I really struggle with it—it makes me incredibly anxious," she says, scooping up some eggs and sausage (no more veganism, but more on that later) at New York's Greenwich Hotel. She also enjoys a heavy-handed metaphor. "I'm really good at those in my acting," she adds wryly, "and in my life."

One thing Hathaway's not into, however: a pity party. It's rare that an actress will admit an image problem to her publicist, let alone the general public. Cut to a conference room at Bazaar this past summer, where the legendary art director George Lois collaborated with Hathaway on the concept for this cover story. "So some people don't like you, right?" Lois asks. "Yep," she replies.

So here we are, kissing and making up. "What are we supposed to do—pretend like it didn't happen?" Hathaway asks. It happened all right, a steady lava of invective that began after her Golden Globes acceptance speech and continued for six weeks, all the way to the Oscars, with "Hathahater" echoing around social media for a year after that. "People treated me a certain way," she says. "But I've grown from it. This whole thing has made me a way more compassionate and loving person. And I don't feel sorry for myself."

As she was preparing for the Golden Globes, Hathaway had just come off a wave of press that focused on her losing weight and shaving her head to play Fantine. "I damaged my health during Les Mis, which I didn't want to mention in case it seemed like I was courting sympathy," she says. She was exhausted, flu-ridden, and frustrated about the lack of interest in the character and in the issue of sexual slavery. So when Hathaway won the award for Best Supporting Actress, she was "weirdly presentational. One of the things I've been accused of is being inauthentic. And they were right—but not for the reason they thought.

"I couldn't tie this moment to what I really wanted to say," she continues. "And that's on me, because Lupita did it," she observes of Lupita N'yongo's graceful speech on winning Best Supporting Actress earlier this year for 12 Years a Slave. Hathaway "fumbled through the end," got offstage, and realized that she'd forgotten to thank her manager of 15 years, who was battling cancer. "One of my most regretted life moments," she says. When Les Misérables won for Best Musical or Comedy, Hathaway asked the film's producer Eric Fellner if she could say something else. "While everyone was still getting onstage, I spoke. I should have gone after everyone else. I own that; it was rude. People saw that as grabby, I guess. I don't know."

The next day, Hathaway had some friends over to brainstorm a Funny or Die video about celebrity pregnancy rumors, "like, could we get Jen Aniston to talk about how long she's actually been gestating, according to the tabloids." While Googling her own pregnancy rumors, it popped up in an article asking, "Why does everyone hate Anne Hathaway?"

Punched in the gut," she remembers. "Shocked and slapped and embarrassed. Even now I can feel the shame." Hathaway had also just turned 30 and gotten married, to Adam Shulman, two life-altering moments that got mixed up in a roiling pot of bad PR. "I was in crisis," she says. "Now I'd be fine. I really would be. I'd let it roll off my back, but at the time I was still partly Fantine. I was still identifying with being a victim."

Victim or no, it sucked. Abuse was thrown at Hathaway as regularly as borrowed jewels. And on top of that, there was Dressgate. For the Oscars, "I found a dress, like a month before," she explains. "It was the most beautiful, reflective, shimmery dress—rainbows were going to dance off me." However, the day before the ceremony, Hathaway was called by a tearful stylist's assistant saying that the dress had already been worn. So she regrouped, choosing a gown by Valentino. "I love the house, and he's my buddy," she says of the famed designer, with whom she has been friends for years. "One of my favorite people in the entire world. It all made sense." But that night, at Oscar rehearsals, her Les Misérables castmate Amanda Seyfried showed Hathaway her Alexander McQueen dress. "And it's a lilac version of my dress. Two completely different designers." At 10 o'clock the night before the Oscars, "I didn't have a friggin' dress, which I normally wouldn't care about …" Long pause. "But I really needed a dress, and everybody hates me, and I just really needed a dress."

On the morning of the Oscars, a pale pink satin Prada gown arrived at Hathaway's house. "I was like, 'Wow! I can do this. It's beautiful. It's appropriate. It's modern. It's minimal.' " Minimalism needs tailoring, and tailoring took time Hathaway didn't have. "I look in the mirror, turn to Adam, and say, 'It looks like my nipples are hard.' He says, 'You look beautiful. Your nipples look pointy. The red carpet's about to close. We gotta go.' "

Anyway, yes, "it came true." Hathaway won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, for a performance that was a true feat of commitment and physical extremes. And she lost, for committing the crime of public earnestness.

After winning an Oscar, they say that a girl's phone rings off the hook. For Hathaway, it was the opposite. "I had directors say to me, 'I think you're great. You're perfect for this role, but I don't know how audiences will accept you because of all this stuff, this baggage,' " she recalls. Then Christopher Nolan called. Hathaway had last worked with Nolan on The Dark Knight Rises, in which she played Catwoman. He wanted to take her into space. "Once it was announced that I was doing Interstellar," she remembers, "thankfully the phone started ringing again."

In Interstellar, out this month, Hathaway plays an astronaut who ventures into space alongside Matthew McConaughey to save an endangered Earth. "She's very serious, very prickly," she says. Very non-Hathaway, and, at the time, very necessary. "I watched my first scene the other day and I was like, 'Oh, my God! Chris, I'm such a bitch!' And he said [she puts on a droll British accent], 'Yeah, but you grow quite fond of her.' "

The shoot entailed several weeks in Iceland, with Hathaway spending most of her days in a 40-pound space suit. That's where she bid veganism adieu. "I just didn't feel good or healthy," she says, "not strong." Cut to a Reykjavík restaurant and an adventurous costar who said that they should try everything: She caved with a fresh piece of fish—"from a stream I could see from where I was sitting." The next day she "just felt better." So now, when she needs chicken soup for the soul, she'll have chicken soup.

More recently Hathaway has been back in New York, shooting The Intern with Robert De Niro (he's the intern), and contemplating what daring means to her. "It's easier to think about the way I'm least daring. When I meet people for the first time, I'm friendly but shy. I'm much less outwardly nervous than I used to be, but I still get anxious sometimes." What else? She looks down at her clear brogues. "I'm not very daring in my street style, usually because there's a photographer around!" Today she's wearing her "favorite shirt in the world," an Iro tank that reads, NO BAD VIBES. "I am getting more daring now—I'll wear my mom jeans in public that haven't been tailored 'just so' yet, just because they feel good. For a long time I was afraid of the harsh things people would say about me, but I might as well be happy."

One of the ways Hathaway is daring is with the menfolk. "I have no problem making the first move when I see a guy I like," she announces. Like with Shulman, her husband of two years. "I was in L.A. when I met him. I was told he had a girlfriend, and I backed off because I'm not that girl. Then when I found out six weeks later that he didn't have a girlfriend, I was like, 'We should throw a party. We should invite Adam.' " And the rest is history. "From the very first second we knew it was a very powerful and exciting connection we had," she says. "And it just gets better." Shulman is widely acknowledged to be one of the nicest chaps around. "There's no pushing him around," she adds, "but he's so gentle and present."

Hathaway's other daring move: her career path. "Even though I've had great success, touch wood, it hasn't been easy. A lot of people have told me, 'You're not this and so can't play that,' and I can't tell you the amount of times I've been told I'm not sexy. I just go: 'I'm a lot of things. Just because I don't wear my sexiness overtly doesn't mean that I can't become that girl for a role. That's what I do; I become things. Use your imagination, buddy.' So in terms of not listening to what other people told me about who I was as an actress and then really pursuing it, I think I've been daring in that way."

Hathaway tips a daring hat to, number one, Tilda Swinton. "Tilda is it, but she's so cool about it. She's so cool, she'd be like, 'Oh, it's not daring. I just did it.' Hmm, Jonathan Demme"—who directed Hathaway to her first Oscar nomination, for Rachel Getting Married—"he's still my mentor and hero. And Matthew McConaughey is the most daring man I know. He never judged himself along the way, and it's all come together for him so wholly and deeply. He is totally himself."

When it comes to style, "Leandra Medine from [the blog] Man Repeller. I feel empowered by her. Not just her humor; she reminds me of Diana Vreeland. She wants girls to dress for themselves, be goofy, awesome girls. I have a Pinterest board, which is called Closet Crush, and it's just all her and Jane Birkin and a little Sophia Amoruso because I think she's fabulous too."

Ask Hathaway about her most daring outfit and the answer is swift: "I fucking think that pink Oscar dress!" She laughs. "Now that you know the backstory, that was by far in a way the most daring dress I have ever worn. It maybe didn't look it, but that was it."

Now that dress—and everything that came with it—is on the shelf. After The Intern, Hathaway is heading to London to reprise her role as the White Queen, in the sequel to Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking Glass. And after that, a long break, some work with an initiative called the Girl Effect, and "being home. I don't want to hunt down jobs right now. I want to take it easy and explore other things," she says, smiling. "Other aspects of myself."

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