Anne Hathaway, who won the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ for Les Misérables in 2013, has revealed the victory had negative effects on her career.
Hathaway starred in the production alongside Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Helena Bonham Carter, Eddie Redmayne, Amanda Seyfried, and Sacha Baron Cohen. In addition to being lauded by the Academy Awards, the movie was also a box office smash, earning over $ 440 million at cinemas alone.
However, while the success of this role could have parachuted Hathaway’s career to the next level, an online backlash led to her falling out of favor in Hollywood.
Thankfully, Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan was on hand to provide Hathaway a route back into superstardom when he cast her to be in his 2014 movie Interstellar, and the actor remains eternally grateful for the faith shown by Nolan.
In a new interview with Vanity Fair, she explained: “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.”
Despite it being a traumatic sequence of events to suffer, Hathaway feels she came out of the experience with a stronger spirit.
The actor remarked: “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.”
She concluded by noting: “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 offering?”
This new set of comments isn’t the first time that Hathaway has reflected upon the miserable time that ensued following Les Misérables.
In 2022, she said while giving a speech at an event by Elle Women in Hollywood, “Ten years ago, I was allowed to look at the language of hatred from a new perspective. For context — this was a language I had employed with myself since I was seven. 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.”
Hathaway said that it left her with “no desire to have anything to do with this line of energy” and made a promise to herself to “no longer hold space for it” or “live in fear of it”.
The star’s upcoming movie, The Idea of You, is set to arrive on Prime Video on May 2nd. It sees her character, a 40-year-old single mother, become entangled in an unlikely love affair with a much younger man, who also happens to be the frontman of the world’s biggest boy band after taking her daughter to Coachella.
Watch the trailer for The Idea of You below.
