Actress Anne Hathaway, 31, appeared on the Ellen DeGeneres show this Thursday. She addressed the cyber bullying she experienced after she won an Academy Award for Les Miserables. Ellen told her guest,
“For whatever reason – and trust me it’s a small group,– “cyber bullies are” loud because I went through this, and voices that don’t like you and say mean things really stick with you for some reason, more than voices that say you’re great! So when that was going on after the Oscars, what you should have been celebrating – you won an Oscar! – And then all of a sudden… Explain how you accidentally googled something and this is what you found.”
Hathaway explained to Ellen that she had began to regularly Google herself. And in an instance where her and her friends wanted to make a funny or die video about pregnant celebrity rumors she came upon this story titled, “why does everybody hate Anne Hathaway?” Ellen then asked “how did you deal with all that [cyber bullying]?”
“Well I listened up first. I couldn’t help it you know? And you try to shut it off and I couldn’t, and then I realized why I couldn’t. I hadn’t learned to love myself yet. I hadn’t gotten there. And if you don’t love yourself and someone else says a horrible thing to you, part of you is always going to believe them.… I don’t want to believe these people. I don’t want to agree with them on any level. And I want to figure out who I am. I want to learn why. I don’t want to feel like I’m fragile every time I leave the house I’m so dependent on what other people think of me.” “So I just took a step back and as Matthew McConaughey, my costar in Interstellar would say “just keep living” I feel like I have arrived in a place where maybe not every minute of every day but way more than I used to, I have a tremendous amount of love and compassion for everyone else – and best of all I have it for myself which I never enjoyed before.”
Ellen shared comforting words with the actress by saying, “there’s a phrase: what you think of me is none of my business and there’s nothing wrong with being fragile. I think it’s a beautiful thing.”
