I covered most of the nonsense that went down with Anne Hathaway back in late 2012 and early 2013, the height of her Oscar campaign for Les Miserables. I remember how harsh people were about all things Annie, and I remember defending her… sometimes. To be fair to Annie, she’s not the first person to oversee an overzealous Oscar campaign and she’s not the first person to oversaturate the media with too many interviews, too many magazine covers, too many photo-ops, too much twee-ness (coughNataliePortmancough). To be fair to the media, Anne WAS overzealous, annoying and much, much too cloying and needy. It was like everyone forgot that, oh right, she’s actually an A-list actress with a great deal of talent. Even Annie forgot. Was the coverage of her at times overblown, rude and “bullying”? Yes, it was. But I do think there’s a difference in “bullying” coverage and coverage that was basically like “please settle down, girl, you’re embarrassing yourself.”
I bring this all up because Annie is promoting Interstellar, and she keeps speaking of that moment in her life. To hear Annie tells it, the Hathahate was like being punched and slapped. When Anne sat down with Ellen DeGeneres this week, Ellen was really nice to her and Ellen referred to what happened as “cyberbullying.” Agree or disagree? Eh. You can see the video here. Here’s what went down:
Through hate, Anne Hathaway learned to love. The actress, 31, appeared on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Thursday, where she opened up about the backlash she suffered after winning Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in Les Misérables.
“For whatever reason—and it’s a small group, trust me—[cyber bullies are] loud because I went through this,” host Ellen DeGeneres told her guest sympathetically. “And voices that don’t like you and say mean things really stick with you for some reason, more than voices that say, ‘You’re great!’ So, when that was going on after the Oscars, which you should have been celebrating—you won an Oscar!—and then all the sudden…Explain how you accidentally Googled something and this is what you found.”
Hathaway, a Hollywood veteran, said she “had gotten out of the habit of Googling myself because that’s just a bad idea to ever do that.” But in a rare instance, she said, “My friends and I had an idea for Funny or Die and we wanted to do something on celebrity pregnancy rumors, so we just Googled pregnancy rumors and the story came up. The title of it was ‘Why Does Everyone Hate Anne Hathaway?’”
The audience gasped, to which she said, “It’s really OK. It has a happy ending. Life continues.”
“Yes, but I know what that feels like and I think when people write things like that or say things like that it is cyber bullying,” DeGeneres told Hathaway. “How did you deal with all that?”
“Well, I listened at first. I couldn’t help it, you know? And you try to shut it off and I couldn’t, and then I realized why I couldn’t was I hadn’t learned to love myself yet. I hadn’t gotten there. And if you don’t love yourself when someone else says horrible thing to you part of you is always going to believe them,” she said. “So, then I was like, ‘OK, I don’t want to believe these people. I don’t want to agree with them on any level. And I want to figure out who I am. I want to learn who I am. I don’t want to feel like I’m fragile every time I leave the house because I’m so dependent on what other people think about me. So, I just took a step back, and as Matthew McConaughey, my co-star in Interstellar, would say, ‘I just kept living.’ And, it’s been a really cool journey,” Hathaway said. “I feel like I arrived in a place where maybe not every minute of every day, but way more than I used to, I have a tremendous amount of love and compassion for everyone else—and best of all I have it for myself, which I never enjoyed before.”
DeGeneres then offered the actress more support, saying, “There’s a great phrase: ‘What you think of me is none of my business.’ And there’s nothing wrong with being fragile. I think it’s a beautiful thing.”
[From E! News]
I too think it’s okay to be fragile and for a person to acknowledge that they’ve been hurt by certain comments. But I don’t care for the way Anne is allowing herself to be infantilized by this – she wasn’t some little girl done in by dastardly bullies, nor was she physically assaulted or damaged in any profound way. She was a grown woman flashing her Oscar Biscuit at the premiere of Les Mis and throwing hissy fits when she didn’t get her perfect Oscar dress and some people on the Internet said mean things about her. That’s it. I do agree that Annie probably didn’t “love herself” enough to ignore the haters, but… I don’t know. I’m not really feeling this whole Poor Bullied Annie Hathaway Campaign of 2014.
