Do we like Anne Hathaway?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Years of public support for LGBTQ+ people, refugees and women, with no harmful words or company found and only a contested on-set story to dent it.
Anne Hathaway is one of those actors who got famous young and then copped a decade of internet pile-ons for being, apparently, too keen. She has said the online backlash after her Oscar win for Les Misérables in 2013 was so toxic that some people wouldn't cast her. She credited Christopher Nolan with giving her a role when others hesitated.
The drama in her recent past is mostly gossip-grade. A hairstylist said on a podcast in 2024 that she treated him like a servant on a film set. Her rep replied that it was unfortunate his memory of their time differed so dramatically from hers. It's one person's account in entertainment press, not a pattern, so we note it and move on.
On the harm test, she comes out clean. In 2017 she posted in support of refugees during the immigration ban fight, wrote that the moment could not be met with silence, and told followers to give to the ACLU and Doctors Without Borders. Nothing in what I read ties her to dodgy company or conspiracy talk.
On LGBTQ+ rights she has put her name on the line. She was honoured at the Human Rights Campaign's 2018 dinner, where she spoke about the myth that other identities orbit around straight, cisgender or white ones. Critics online sniped at her, but I found no harmful words of her own anywhere.
The 2026 story that shows her at her best is The Devil Wears Prada 2. Meryl Streep told Harper's Bazaar that Hathaway went straight to the producers about alarmingly thin runway models in Milan. Hathaway told Variety she asked for a more size-inclusive approach and that producers changed it fast. She also said reports of anyone being fired over it were wrong.
Off screen she has done real advocacy. UN Women made her a Goodwill Ambassador in 2016, focused on the unequal burden of care work. In 2017 she told the UN that paid parental leave shouldn't just be a mother's issue, asking why we undervalue fathers and overburden mothers.