During her first trip to the Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of her movie Armageddon Time, Anne Hathaway floated in a white column of Armani Privé and a Bulgari necklace so absurdly blingy that it brought to mind the Heart of the Ocean necklace from the movie Titanic.
Styled by Erin Walsh, who has worked with Anne for years, the Cannes looks have been something of an onslaught: a glorious Schiaparelli jumpsuit, like a yass-ified curtain. A prim Louis Vuitton mini. Something luscious and hot pink from Valentino. Images of Anne in a beehive hairdo, cat-eye sunglasses, and a Gucci mini dress now paper the internet – a near caricature of fabulous stardom.
And all of a sudden, Hatha-haters are dropping their snark like a clumsy romantic-comedy heroine dropping her purse at a busy intersection. Anne might be the celebrity who bears the greatest burden of the internet’s capriciousness and mob-like quickness to annihilate a person’s reputation based on vibes. Out: mocking Anne Hathaway online. In: insisting that you always loved Anne Hathaway, that you have been defending her since before you were born, that you closed your eyes when you blew out the birthday candles this year and wished for her happiness.
This spring, as she has been promoting the AppleTV+ miniseries WeCrashed and now Armageddon Time, Anne has been receiving constant, glowing praise. She has always garnered praise from critics for her performances. This is different. This time public opinion has changed.
She has been on an upward trajectory since around four years ago, when she played a comedic (but, crucially, hot) antagonist in Ocean’s Eight, swiftly followed by playing a comedic (but, crucially, not hot) witch in The Witches. During these recent years the actor has consistently looked – both aesthetically and spiritually – the way you look in your fantasies when you run into your ex on the street. In fact, at the moment, Anne’s entire public presence feels like a fantasy from one of her early movies.
This is a victory for a number of groups: theater kids, pale women, hot people who have been bullied, and certainly for Anne and her loyal fandom. But let’s be clear – it’s not some kind of proof that the pop culture of today is less cruel to women. It’s not even a reflection of her performances, which have always been unimpeachable.
It comes down to this: Anne Hathaway was most disliked when she had buzzed hair and played a sex worker and sang loudly and won a top award for acting and gave a lot of interviews.
She is most liked now, when she is appearing on red carpets in couture, talking less, and, most important, showing no signs of having aged in the years she has been in the public eye. It’s hard to talk about a woman celebrity’s appearance without being gross, but the situation here is fairly obvious: Anne Hathaway made her movie debut in The Princess Diaries 21 years ago. She looks about the same now as she did then. She is doing the best thing any public figure can do in a culture that hates aging: She is Paul Rudd–ing.
Anne was always beautiful and always talented. But now on top of that, her ageless appearance is being conflated with being sweet and interesting and aspirational. Because she has attained a new level of beauty and stopped giving interviews about how she lost weight by giving up cheese in favor of radishes, her talent is palatable.
The narrative has changed: Suddenly the unpopular girl is the queen bee, the underdog is the top dog, the mousy loser has become the shiny-haired winner. How could Anne ever be seriously referred to as unpopular or a loser or an underdog? She anchored her first Disney blockbuster, The Princess Diaries, before she turned 20. She has starred in rom-coms, superhero franchises, space epics, musicals, and indies, and rarely gotten a bad review. She won an Oscar and an Emmy and a Golden Globe and a lifetime of being reproduced in memes with Meryl Streep, thanks to The Devil Wears Prada. She has rarely had a bad review. Her costars gush about her. Clearly, critics, movie executives, fashion designers, celebrities, and many, many fans love Anne Hathaway.
That just leaves one group: people who are loud online. This divide demonstrates both the limits of internet culture as a mirror of real life, and also its power. Anne’s lack of popularity on the web hasn’t been able to keep her from major opportunities, but it has become a cultural phenomenon of its own right. She has the dubious distinction of being able to say that the year that she won an Oscar and starred in a blockbuster smash – Les Misérables – was a nadir in her popularity.
“I did have the internet turn on me and hate me and it was like a whole big thing,” she said last year, of the aftermath of winning the Academy Award for best supporting actress in 2013. Her whimpered “It came true!” upon holding her Oscar statuette has been echoed cruelly as an example of goody-goody preciousness ever since. She said she once came across a video titled, “Why Do People Hate Anne Hathaway?”
The main charge is not that Anne Hathaway is untalented or undeserving of celebrity. It’s an issue with her perceived personality. She has been labeled annoying, somehow both overeager and smug, try-hard but also weirdly honest, unfunny. Consider this 2015 exchange between two hosts of the radio show Dish Nation, when the name “Anne Hathaway” came up.
It’s textbook: One person is a vehement defender; the other is, under the guise of rationality, trying to catch her somehow tricking us. These critiques are clearly based to some degree on her gender. “The anti-Hathers were a stark reminder that public-facing women aren’t allowed to want things, or they’ll be sentenced to an eternity in internet hell,” Jill Gutowitz wrote in Vice in 2019. “The baseless hate was textbook misogyny.”
It’s true that Anne’s public tone seems to awake some ancient internal anxiety about gender. No male celebrity in recent memory has cooked up this flavor of public disdain. (Ed Sheeran might be the closest – he is a writer, so critiques of his lyrics are more fair game when it comes to analysing his character than critiques of Hathaway’s tossed-off red-carpet quotes.) Vitriol toward Anne seems to stem from the same source as vitriol toward Katherine Heigl and, to some degree, Jennifer Lawrence. Famous people are, in general, eager to please, attention-seeking perfectionists, since that is what pays for their jets and property portfolios. One of Anne’s crimes seems to be that she doesn’t disguise this longing as successfully as her peers. She isn’t “chill.” She gets emotional.
There is sexism implicit in collective hatred toward Anne Hathaway. But surely the end game of sexism isn’t that no woman should ever be called annoying. Male celebrities get called annoying. Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost titled his memoir A Very Punchable Face because, well, it’s true. Benedict Cumberbatch’s hotness or lack thereof has been discussed publicly enough to surely drive him into a few hundred hours of extra therapy. Justin Bieber, for all the adoration he receives, has also been roasted to a crisp. The difference is that male celebrities get to have obvious flaws and still be widely beloved. They get to age. They get to say dumb things and be forgiven.
Anne Hathaway’s fans were always right about her talent. Her new fans like her because she finally seems perfect.
Jenny Singer is a staff writer for Glamour. You can follow her on Twitter.
This article was originally published on Glamour.com.
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