Anne Hathaway says ‘toxic’ online hatred cost her acting roles

Anne Hathaway has said that the “toxic” online reaction to her natural sincerity has lost her acting roles.

The American actress, 41, explained that even though she won an Oscar for her role in Les Misérables in 2013, she was not being cast after public opinion turned against her.

Speaking to Vanity Fair as the magazine’s April cover star, she said: “A lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online.”

The 2013 viral phenomenon dubbed “Hathahate” had no actual cause, other than the actress enjoying a surge in exposure following the Best Supporting Actress victory she received and an online backlash that branded her “annoying”.

However, The Devil Wears Prada star explained that Christopher Nolan’s decision to cast her in the science fiction epic Interstellar despite this meant that her career did “not lose momentum”.

“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.

As a result of the two-time Academy Award-winning director hiring her, she added that “my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me”.

She told Vanity Fair that humiliation is “such a rough thing to go through” but that the key to managing it is to “not let it close you down”.

“You have to stay bold,” she added.

In 2022, during a speech at Elle’s Women in Hollywood event, Hathaway said that the backlash against her felt so personal in many ways because it mirrored her own negative self-talk.

“This was a language I had employed with myself since I was seven,” she said at the time, adding: “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 this period in her life marks “the first time I’ve known myself this well”.

She added: “I don’t live in what others think of me. I know my own mind and I am connected to my own feelings.”