Oh my God, everyone. Drop what you're doing. Put down the knitting needles. Throw the toothbrush across the room. Loosen your grip on the goldfish. (Everyone's knitting false teeth for their goldfish to brush, right?) There is something really, really important—yes, more important than crafting yarn-based dental implants for fish—that we all have to do: Boost Anne Hathaway's self-esteem.
From People:
Anne Hathaway looks as unequivocally gorgeous and radiant as ever on the March cover of InStyle—though she’s probably the only person out there who doesn’t see it: “I think I’ve got really weird features. I have very large features on a very small head,” she tells the magazine. “But, you know, I’m not going to beat myself up. It’s my face. I’m not very pretty. But that’s OK because I do know that I look like myself, and I think at the end of the day, as nice as pretty is, authenticity is more important.”
OMG No! We cannot lose another well-paid, celebrated, stylish, attractive actress to the ravages of insecurity. If Hathaway keeps this up, pretty soon she'll be talking to Harper's Bazaar about her "awkward stage," and calling Life & Style or Cosmo or any magazine who'll listen to tell them about how she doesn't consider herself a sex symbol, and "Oh, I have so many flaws!" Someone has to save the pretty actresses who can't/won't admit their prettiness!
Let's all write letters to In Style or People right now telling Anne Hathaway how we think she's, like, so so pretty. Then she'll never have to go fishing for compliments, or feigning modesty about her looks, or picking apart her perceived flaws in public in the hope of seeming down-to-earth (which is sad in at least 5 ways), or talking about how she's learned to accept her "authentic" looks (which must have been so hard, seeing as how they're a huge part of her incredible success as an actress and spokesmodel), or whatever combination of the above is going on here, and we'll never have to read a quote like that ever again.
Of course, that quote isn't really Anne Hathaway's fault. It's In Style's. (And People's, but everything is People's fault.) They’re indulging in the favorite celebrity profile trope of fashion magazines: A decadent, 6-page photo spread of a pretty actress looking incandescent and gorgeous, accompanied by an interview where the actress reveals her low self-esteem. No doubt the magazine thinks this formula “humanizes” the actress (again, this is sad in at least 5 ways). After all, isn’t everyone insecure? But they fail to recognize that not everyone is a successful movie star styled for 4 hours before posing in a pile of purple organza for the cover of a magazine. The overall effect of profiles like In Style’s is discordance. It’s like watching someone flawlessly execute a complicated dance routine, while being prodded to say, “Oh, I have two left feet!”
This is one of the many times that I wish all interviews were in Q&A format, because I'd love to see exactly what questions the writer asked in order to elicit the "I think I've got really weird features…" response. "What do you think of your face?" Or: "You're so pretty, right?" Maybe: "What's it like to be good-looking?" Or: "Would you say that your features are normal, or, like, another word?"
Perhaps it was a simple prompt like, "Talk about your face." It's impossible to respond to something like that without irritating everyone within an 18-foot radius. Well, except: "I had nothing to do with it." Or "No."