Anne Hathaway Is In Her Goddess Era

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | May 9, 2024 |

By Kayleigh Donaldson | Celebrity | May 9, 2024 |

In The Idea of You, the new romantic comedy from director Michael Showalter, a 40-year-old single mother falls into a whirlwind romance with a 24-year-old boyband member. Much of the film is about her relationship with herself, realizing that she is entitled to her own pleasure and that her desires didn’t stop being valid once she became a parent. While much has been made about the film being glorified Harry Styles fanfiction (the author did use Styles as inspiration for her hero but it was never technically fanfic), the core of The Idea of You is its protagonist’s embrace of her own self-worth. It’s not hard to see what drew Anne Hathaway to the role.

The Hathaway cycle has been an intense example of the perils of celebrity. The Oscar-winning actress went through the wringer over the past 20 years, going from kooky teen star to prestige actress to public punching bag and now to glamorous icon who everyone loves. We’ve talked a lot on this site about how unfair and blatantly sexist the Hatha-hate train was. In hindsight, it’s really rather bananas that we ever saw it as acceptable to loathe a woman for the crime of being earnest. Anne Hathaway wasn’t the first or last major female celebrity to experience this cruelty, but the way the public finally came round to her and wholeheartedly embraced her as a figure of elegance, cool, and millennial aspiration does feel unique. Now, she’s in her goddess era and everyone has heralded it as her rightful status.

I don’t wish to regurgitate the tedium that plagued Hathaway for so long but we do need to contextualize a few things. When Hathaway signed on to play Fantine in the film version of mega-musical Les Misérables, everyone knew she would win the Oscar for it. She could have played Abe Lincoln turning into the Joker in an inspirational war drama that required her to learn how to tap dance and it would have been less effective awards bait than Les Miz. She went all out for the role too, which required her to lose weight, have her hair chopped off on-camera, and sing ‘I Dreamed a Dream’ live while sitting down (because Tom Hooper is a hack who made everything needlessly hard for his actors.) She knocked it out of the park and everyone knew it, so the months following the film’s release saw Hathaway playing the Oscar game and being an efficient campaigner.

But, of course, being open about one’s desire to win the biggest honour in your field is apparently unforgivable, and she was frequently pitted against that year’s Best Actress winner, Jennifer Lawrence, whose coolness and goofy persona made her more ‘likeable’ than her contemporary. You look back at that time and truly wonder what Hathaway’s crime was. Was it truly terrible for her to be so earnest about playing a difficult role, one of an exploited woman dying of consumption? She was never anything less than gracious, kind, and dedicated to her job. Even when creepy Matt Lauer tried to shame her live on TV for the paparazzi doing upskirt shots of her, she gently smacked him down and tied it all back to the film she was promoting. In hindsight, Hathaway was killing it. But she had too much theatre kid energy, apparently. She was trying too hard. She was a perennial overachiever and it reminded too many people of their own insecurities. Perfection is a tough quality to embrace for many, and Hathaway was just too polished for that crowd.

We’ve all agreed that the Hathaway backlash was stupid and never should have happened, especially as we’ve grown hyper-aware of how quickly such things are hijacked by right-wing losers trying to push an agenda (hello to all the people who won’t leave Rachel Zegler alone.) It’s a relief to see the changing tides, but it’s made all the more satisfying by the fact that Hathaway really didn’t have to change who she was for it to happen. She didn’t have to stop being earnest or do a major career U-turn into transformative roles that shook off the image that had become so toxic. It could have been so different too. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, Hathaway admitted that, post-Oscars, the industry seemed put off by her thanks to the online hate. It certainly took a couple of years for the roles to get better, although she has some cracking parts in there (see Colossal for one of her greatest performances.)

Her consistency was key. Even in lesser works, she’s never half-assing it. She excelled in comedies as well as dramas, did TV and film and stage work, and earned some of her best reviews. In the past two years alone, she’s given us Armageddon Time, Eileen, and WeCrashed. Moreover, they are roles that all play off of those instinctive Hathaway qualities: impeccably manicured women with aspirational qualities who reveal an inner darkness that complicates that image of perfection. That and there was a lot of glamour to appreciate. As she was embodying Marilyn blonde and noir glam on-screen in the sinfully underrated Eileen, she was draped head-to-toe in Versace off-screen and giving editorial Looks that destroyed the long-wrong idea that she was ever basic.

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If anything has changed about Hathaway, it’s that she seems more unbothered. She’s talked in interviews about how that hate cycle hurt her and how she couldn’t help but internalize all the weird headlines claiming that everyone despised her. Those moments of candour are still there, like in that Vanity Fair profile, but if she’s here for anything now, it’s to do her job and have fun. Because she’s extremely good at her job, both of acting and being famous. She can sing, dance, act, do comedy and drama, wear seven-inch heels and get Christopher Nolan to return her calls. Wouldn’t you be tempted to rub that in everyone’s faces? She doesn’t, though, because ultimately she is still a nice person and hasn’t been curdled by years of cruelty. There’s radiance where there could justifiably be bitterness. If the best revenge is living well then Hathaway has a gold medal in that category.

There’s a moment in her Vanity Fair video accompaniments where she watches clips of herself in The Princess Diaries and tears up. It could be extremely self-aggrandizing to cry at your own movies, but for Hathaway, the moment is so evidently genuine. She is so fond of her early work, of having worked with legends like Julie Andrews, and of how much audiences still love those films. “I’m really glad that I’m that girl right there,” she says of her on-screen teen self. Frankly, so are we.

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