Opinion: Anne Hathaway is right to be fed up with haters
Gaining weight for a new movie role, Anne Hathaway took to Instagram on April 5 to get ahead of “all the people who are going to fat shame me.” Ugh. It’s a bummer that an acclaimed actress and toddler-mum feels the need to pre-empt judgemental jibes about her body.
Remember when Hatha-hate was a thing? Making fun of her became sport after she hosted the 2011 Oscars, when her uncomfortably palpable enthusiasm was jarring next to co-host James Franco’s droll, dead-eyed style. She caught the brunt of the backlash which, looking back, may have been a bad call given Franco’s now-patchy reputation.
And yes, her extremely earnest 2013 Oscars acceptance speech for Les Misérables seemed like she’d been practising it since she was a kid staring out the car window on her way to after school auditions. That’s because she probably had been. But is that so wrong?
She's admitted she's been hurt by the hate in the past but after all these years, “it’s not that I’ve gotten a rhino skin to it, but I sort of see all of that for what it is,” she said last year. “How the world feels about me has nothing to do with me. How other people treat me has nothing to do with me.”
Hathaway’s chief crime seems to be being seen as “uncool.” And yet, her latest online Instagram message to body bullies is the coolest: “It’s not me,” she wrote. “It’s you.”
