How Anne Hathaway Dealt With Internet Haters

Anne Hathaway has made peace with the fact that the Internet once hated her, and she hopes the rest of us can too.

The actress recently sat down with Jezebel to talk about her new movie Colossal, in which she plays an Internet writer going through tough times, which prompted a conversation about that period of time in her life in the early 2010’s when Hathaway won an Oscar for Les Miserables — and the Internet was convinced it hated her.

Though it seems like old news now, the actress says she still gets asked about it constantly. “It comes up in every interview I do, just about,” she says. “I am… not eager, but I am ready for the conversation to move to a place beyond it. I don’t have to contextualize all of my stories, all of my experiences through that time. I’m ready for it to be implied, not overtly stated.”

Hathaway admits it was a hard time in her life and that she even had to stop reading certain websites because negative headlines about her would catch her by surprise. But a few years removed now, the actress says she’s grown from that period of her life and found a way to reconcile it.

“How the world feels about me has nothing to do with me,” she says. “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.”

In the candid interview, Hathaway also opens up about posting the first photo of her son Jonathan on Instagram. The actress uploaded a picture of the one-year-old with husband Adam Shulman watching her give a speech to the United Nations on International Women’s Day — and she instantly regretted it.

“I had never posted a photo of my son, and I decided to post a shot of the back of his head, and almost as soon as I’d done it, I wished that I hadn’t,” she admits. “I felt like I had broken some kind of a seal in inviting people into my life. And even though I felt as though I had done it in as protective a way as I could, even though it was a moment I was incredibly proud of, I don’t know that I’ll ever do it again.”

The actress adds that she’s a “big believer” in learning from mistakes and that moment made her realize how she really feels about Instagram now. Stating that it was fun at first, Hathaway says her opinion has changed. “Because of the time we live in, I think words and pictures are carrying a much greater weight,” she says.

The new mom also credits her son for giving her a new way to approach difficult or emotionally-charged conversations, especially around the topic of feminism and women’s rights.

“I don’t often talk about this, but there’s a wonderful thing that you learn when your child’s becoming emotional about something—you become very calm around them,” she says. “I’m finding that’s transferring to the way I communicate with people as well, and in situations like this.”