Anne Hathaway on Hollywood’s Weight Pressure

At 16, She Was Told Not to Gain Weight. Two Decades Later, a Director Asked Her to.

Anne Hathaway was 16 when a casting director gave her the part, then immediately took some of the joy out of it.

“Congratulations, you have the part. I’m not saying you need to lose weight. I’m just saying don’t gain weight,” the director told her, Hathaway recalled in a September 2019 Allure cover story. “Which of course means you need to lose weight.”

It was roughly a year before she landed the role that would launch her career, Mia Thermopolis in 2001’s “The Princess Diaries.” Now 43, Hathaway has spent decades in an industry she says has changed since then, even if not as much as it should have.

A Different Kind of Request

Two decades after that comment, Hathaway found herself on the other side of the same conversation, except reversed. While preparing for the 2020 Netflix thriller “The Last Thing He Wanted,” director Dee Rees asked if she’d be willing to gain about 20 pounds for the role.

Hathaway said yes without hesitation. She posted a 2018 Instagram video of herself lifting weights, getting ahead of the criticism before it arrived.

“I am gaining weight for a movie role and it is going well,” she wrote. “To all the people who are going to fat shame me in the upcoming months, it’s not me, it’s you. Peace xx.”

She added a postscript: she’d wanted to set the video to Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls,” but the rights fell through.

“It Was Just This Beautiful Thing”

The shift on set went beyond the number on a scale. Costume designer Ane Crabtree asked Hathaway detailed questions about how her body changed throughout the month, so her costumes could be adjusted to fit.

“I have Ane Crabtree asking me what my body does on my moon, which I realized meant my period, so she can make adjustments for me,” Hathaway said. “It was just this beautiful thing.”

She’s careful not to overstate how far the industry has come. “I am cautious in my praise of how Hollywood is shifting,” she said. “There is so much more body inclusivity, which is great. But the thin thing is definitely still the centralized ‘normal’ expectation.”

“There Is No Shame”

Hathaway has carried that message beyond film sets. A few months after her first son, Jonathan, was born in 2016, she posted a photo of jeans she’d cut into shorts, alongside a note for other mothers.

“There is no shame in gaining weight during pregnancy (or ever),” she wrote, according to Today. “There is no shame if it takes longer than you think it will to lose the weight (if you want to lose it at all). There is no shame in finally breaking down and making your own jean shorts because last summer’s are just too dang short for this summer’s thighs.”

What the Weight Loss Cost Her

Her openness about weight gain stands in contrast to what she’s described from years earlier, when the demand ran the other direction.

To play Fantine in the 2012 film adaptation of “Les Misérables,” Hathaway lost 25 pounds, a transformation that helped earn her an Academy Award. She later told People’s “The Jess Cagle Interview” that she “wasn’t in a good place” while doing it.

“I’d lost an unhealthy amount of weight in two weeks,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about nutrition. I taxed my body, and my brain bore the brunt of it for a while. I just felt very anxious and very lost at that time.”

She’s said the effects didn’t end when filming wrapped. “That weight loss was not a long-term good thing for my health, and it took a really long time to come back from it,” she said. “And I was still really sick because of it.”

Hathaway is now expecting her third child with husband Adam Shulman, alongside sons Jonathan, 10, and Jack, 6. Two decades of roles have asked her body to shrink, then grow, then shrink again. These days, she’s the one deciding which requests to say yes to.