14 DAY TRIAL // Anne Hathaway was always Hollywood’s darling, but her popularity soared to unprecedented heights because of her heartbreaking performance in “Les Miserables,” which also earned her an Oscar and several other prestigious awards.
Like many other actors, before she was even nominated (but especially afterwards), Anne campaigned hard for her Oscar, which means she did countless appearances and interviews to raise her profile and earn attention from the Academy.
Some even suspect that one particular, very embarrassing red carpet faux pas was also part of her Oscar campaign. Even if that’s not true, Anne still went a bit overboard with the exposure, so an online backlash against her started before she got to the night when she held her Oscar statuette for the first time.
Haters nearly ruined her life
Besides people who took to social media to blast Anne in the most unflattering terms, the backlash also included trade publications and celebrity bloggers pretty much saying the things mentioned above and urging her to take it easier, because she was sure to win that Oscar. Sometimes, too much is simply too much.
To Hathaway, it didn’t matter who said what, she tells Ellen DeGeneres in a new interview for her show. The full segment from the chat is available on DeGeneres’ EllenTube channel.
From where she stood, it seemed like the entire world had turned to hate her and she didn’t understand what she was doing wrong, if anything at all. She explains she found out about the hate campaign against her by accident, when she Googled celebrity pregnancy rumors for a Funny Or Die skit – and what she found instead nearly ruined her life.
If you don’t love yourself, you tend to believe haters
This is the conclusion Anne reached after some time. Though she knew better than to look for articles about herself on Google, she started doing just that, and in no time, she was starting to believe some of the negative things she was reading.
“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,” the actress explains.
It took her some time to understand that she needed to work on herself, discover who she was to feel secure and to love herself. It also took her some time to realize that reading negative stuff online wasn’t helping her in any way, so she just let it go.
“It’s been a really cool journey. 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,” she says.
Stronger, ready to be back in the spotlight
Hathaway has been keeping a low profile post-Oscars season but she’s ready to come back into the spotlight. As of tonight, November 7, 2014, she can be seen in Christopher Nolan’s ninth film to date, “Interstellar,” opposite Matthew McConaughey, Jessica Chastain, and Michael Caine.
This is Anne’s second collaboration with the director, having played Catwoman in his third Batman film, “The Dark Knight Rises.” This time, she’s a scientist who’s part of a spatial mission to find potentially habitable planets for mankind, because Earth’s resources are becoming scarce.
A full review of “Interstellar” is available.