Anne Hathaway Recalls How 'Angel' Christopher Nolan Helped Her Career After Her Online Identity Grew 'Toxic'

Anne Hathaway called Christopher Nolan's 2014 movie 'Interstellar' "one of the best films that I’ve been a part of"

Anne Hathaway is recalling how working with Christopher Nolan kept her afloat amid a period of turmoil in her career.

In a new Vanity Fair cover story, Hathaway, 41, looked back on a period in the 2010s in which she faced significant online scrutiny even as her career shined with an Academy Award win in 2012's Lés Miserables. At that time, Hathaway said, “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," she said of filmmaker Nolan, 53, and his 2014 film Interstellar.

Hathaway had previously appeared in the director's 2013 movie The Dark Knight Rises as Selina Kyle / Catwoman alongside Christian Bale's Batman. She then costarred with Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar as a pair of astronauts in an unspecified future who search for habitable planets in space as Earth loses its ability to sustain life.

“I don’t know if he knew that he was backing me at the time, but it had that effect,” she told the outlet of working with Nolan. “And my career did not lose momentum the way it could have if he hadn’t backed me.”

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Vanity Fair noted that Hathaway does not enjoy looking back on those days of her career and personal life. “Humiliation is such a rough thing to go through,” she told the outlet. “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."

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"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," she added. "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?”

Hathaway spoke about her time working with Nolan, who recently won Best Director and Best Picture for his movie Oppenheimer at the 96th Oscars, during a conversation with Emily Blunt for Variety's Actors on Actors series in December.

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"The part that blows my mind about Chris is that he is authoritative in the best sense of the word," she said at the time, recalling that the director once told her he had visualized a moment in The Dark Knight Rises for years before the shoot.

"He came to me beforehand and said, 'I just want you to know, this shot has lived in my head for many years. I’m going to be very specific about it. I’m going to make you do it a lot, but it’s not actually you,' " she recalled Nolan saying. "'It’s just because I have it in my head a certain way.' ”

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