There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Anne Hathaway seemed to be, for ridiculous reasons, wholly dismissed and disliked by The Internet Dot Com. Thankfully, it seems that silly time has passed.
The confusing backlash against Hathaway may have reached its zenith in late 2012, going into 2013, when she took home her Oscar for Les Miserables and managed to just sorta rub people the wrong way. The Internets deemed, with unwavering certainty, that Anne Hathaway was a phony, trying to fool us all with false modesty and pearl clutching gasps with every award she racked up during the season.
If you back up another two years, however, Hathaway’s 2011 team up with James Franco to host the Oscars was a tire fire simulcast across the world. This was probably where the court of public opinion began to make their early assessments of the young up-and-coming star. Never mind the fact that Hathaway had probably the hardest job in show business that night: overcompensating for a profoundly disinterested James Franco.
For the years following her Oscar win, Anne Hathaway has been slotted. She’s a phony out-of-touch Hollywood actress, or whatever. She’s overrated, or something. She’s annoying! All of these descriptors courtesy of the message-board hive mind of the most bitter patrons of The Internet. The disdain for Hathaway reached a fevered pitch, noticeable enough for her to be asked about it more than once. And she answered these questions, even a week ago, with grace:
“It’s not that I’ve gotten a rhino skin to it, but I sort of see all of that for what it is. … How the world feels about me has nothing to do with me. How other people treat me has nothing to do with me. But if anything that anybody said resonated with me as something I’d like to work on for myself, I took it in like that. And to that extent, I feel like I got to shortcut a lot of my growth. To that extent, even though I wouldn’t have chosen to go through it, I still found a way to be grateful to it.”
Even when Hathaway popped up in 2012, a few months before Les Mis, as Selina Kyle/Catwoman for The Dark Knight Rises, it was met with a shrug, some fanboy grumblings, and a few eye rolls from those who got on the hater train early. Even though she was probably the best part of a disjointed third entry into Nolan’s Batman world. And you know it’s true.
Now, though, Anne Hathaway has infiltrated the virginal basement-dwelling geekdom with Colossal, a sci-fi comedy mashup getting terrific reviews and being lauded for its uniqueness. The great performances in Brokeback Mountain and Rachel Getting Married were snooty and art house enough for the message board warriors to just ignore. But not now. Colossal is the sort of quirky little monster film the nerd embraces, and for most respectable nerds out there they would think nothing of Anne Hathaway being front and center.
But for some, it’s an about face for them to embrace Hathaway’s performance in Colossal. And it’s being praised as a great performance, with rumblings that this is some sort of comeback for an actress who consistently delivers quality. A comeback? Sure, she’s had her fair share of Bride Wars, but overall Anne Hathaway is an actress who never deserved the sort of derision she received just because the masses needed a villain at the time. She is talented, and beyond all that, she seems cool. She’s done nothing any other actress hasn’t done somewhere along the way, but inexplicably it was her who had to absorb the keyboard jury’s wrath.
Anne Hathaway isn’t in anyone’s face. She isn’t in every other movie. She isn’t draped across the tabloids weekly. And yet she had to wear the label of Most Hated Actress because somebody’s gotta. And now, it’s cool for some to like her again; personally, I’ve been over here liking her all along.
