Anne Hathaway covers the May issue of Vanity Fair, mostly to promote The Idea of You. That’s the film adaptation of the book of the same name, all about a romance between a Harry Styles-like rock star and a 40-year-old divorcee. It looks cute, honestly, although I already know that Anne’s bangs are going to upset me throughout the film. As I read through this VF cover story, I was reminded again of how Anne really worries about how she’s perceived and she feels criticism really deeply. It really affects her. She’s still bringing up the “Hathahate” era from more than a decade ago as some kind of defining moment of her life. While I have understanding and compassion for Anne and what she went through, it also feels a bit like Taylor Swift and her “cancellation of 2016.” These are popular, rich, respected, beautiful women who get some pushback/criticism (deserved or not) and it absolutely rattles them to their core, to the point where they’re still talking about that three-month period of their lives where people were making fun of them years later. Some highlights from Vanity Fair:

She gave up alcohol, turned 40, and started treating herself with more grace. “This is the first time I’ve known myself this well. I don’t live in what others think of me. I know my own mind and I am connected to my own feelings.” Also: “I’m way quicker to laugh now.”

She’s always hyper-prepared for everything: “I’d rather not be unseated on the day [of filming] by my anxiety. Part of the way I can tell myself that I am okay is by having such a complete level of preparation that if I get a critical voice in my head, you can quiet it down by saying that you did everything you could to prepare.” Early in her career, she says, “I had a horrible anxiety attack and I was by myself and didn’t know what was happening. I certainly couldn’t tell anybody, and it was compounded by thinking I was keeping set waiting. Now I feel much safer going to someone in charge, pulling them to the side, and explaining, ‘I’m going through this right now.’ Most people will sit there with you for the 10 minutes it takes for you to come back down.”

The advice she got about how to handle fame: “All the advice that you’re given is to protect yourself. ‘Everybody’s dangerous and everybody’s trying to get something from you.’… People were advising me that I armor myself and keep that distance, and that I have two selves. I found that terribly confusing,” she tells me. “So I don’t do it that way. I’m not armored.”

The Hathahate era was a personal & professional low: Even though she had won an Oscar, she says, “a lot of people wouldn’t give me roles because they were so concerned about how toxic my identity had become online. I had an angel in Christopher Nolan, who did not care about that and gave me one of the most beautiful roles I’ve had in one of the best films that I’ve been a part of. I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time, but it had that effect. And my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.”

The humiliation of the Hathahate era: “Humiliation is such a rough thing to go through. The key is to not let it close you down. You have to stay bold, and it can be hard because you’re like, ‘If I stay safe, if I hug the middle, if I don’t draw too much attention to myself, it won’t hurt.’ But if you want to do that, don’t be an actor. You’re a tightrope walker. You’re a daredevil. You’re asking people to invest their time and their money and their attention and their care into you. So you have to give them something worth all of those things. And if it’s not costing you anything, what are you really offering?”

Why she stopped drinking: “I knew deep down it wasn’t for me. And it just felt so extreme to have to say, ‘But none?’ But none. If you’re allergic to something or have an anaphylactic reaction to something, you don’t argue with it. So I stopped arguing with it.” She wants to make clear that she’s not saying this from a place of self-righteousness or judgment. “It’s a path everybody has to walk for themselves. My personal experience with it is that everything is better. For me, it was wallowing fuel. And I don’t like to wallow. The thing that I have faith in is that everybody else is going to have one or two drinks, and by the time everybody gets to two drinks, you’ll feel like you’ve had two drinks—but without the hangover.”

She was told she had no sex appeal when she was a young actress: “I was like, ‘I’m a Scorpio. I know what I’m like on a Saturday night.’ [But] The male gaze was very dominant and very pervasive and very juvenile. [Now] I feel ready to be a sexual creature out loud.”

[From Vanity Fair]

I like what she says about giving up alcohol – I think people’s relationships with alcohol can change over time, just as our bodies’ reactions to alcohol change over time. What you enjoyed and gave you pleasure at 22 doesn’t feel good or pleasurable at 35 and that’s fine. You’re supposed to grow and change. It feels a bit like Anne has her back up about it, like she’s used to people trying to pour liquor down her throat. Have your mocktail, girl, we’re not judging. The stuff about the Hathahate… sometimes I read Anne’s interviews, most of which reference that era, and I’m really left wondering if I missed something. It was real, I’m not gaslighting her about it – there was a global conversation about how Anne was/is annoying. It lasted for several months, and it was compounded by Anne’s wall-to-wall Oscar campaign and ubiquity at the time. For a sensitive person like Anne, I’m sure it was really upsetting and it truly changed the way she promotes her work and how she does interviews. But instead of being like “you know what, lesson learned, I’ll never wage an Oscar campaign like that again,” she’s spent more than a decade reminding everyone of how they used to think she was annoying for a few months. It’s bizarre.

Cover courtesy of Vanity Fair. Additional pics courtesy of Cover Images.