When Anne Hathaway Revealed the Terribly Disgusting Question She Was Asked at 16

At the premiere of her film Eileen last year, Anne Hathaway discussed the improper questions she got when she was quite young at the Sundance Film Festival. Hathaway revealed one of the first things people asked her when she began acting as she was onstage for a Q&A session after the screening. As reported by Variety, Hathaway told the audience, "Just remembered one of the very first questions I ever got asked when I started acting work, when I had to do press, was, ‘Are you a good girl or a bad girl?" Hathaway went on to say that just a teen then and that 'my 16-year-old self wanted to respond with this film.' 

The video of Hathaway delivering her story was shared on Twitter by Chris Barrett, and the audience gasped in shock when she revealed her story. For those who may not know, Hathway was only 16 years old when she got cast for Get Real, a comedy-drama series on Fox. A couple of years down the road, she finally got a breakthrough in Disney's The Princess Diaries.

During the interview, Hathaway further revealed the reason behind her collaboration with William Oldroyd, the director of Eileen. Hathaway claimed that she admired his work in the 2016 play Lady Macbeth and found it to be "a study of female complication that hit me really, really deep," adding that she trusted Oldroyd to convey nuanced tales involving women. As reported by The Hollywood Reporter, Eileen, adapted by Luke Goebel from a novel by Ottessa Moshfegh, is about a strange young lady whose miserable existence seems to go on forever.

Eileen (played by Thomasin McKenzie) moves between her emotionally troubled father's house and the jail where she works with coworkers who have rejected her in the cold 1960s Boston. As soon as an attractive lady (Hathaway) joins the team, Eileen falls for her. But the newfound confidante traps Eileen in a horrific crime at the very moment when the hope of a salvational friendship—or maybe more—takes root and becomes a lone beacon in her shadow.

Speaking about her role as Rebecca, as reported by AP News, Hathaway said, "Rebecca to me represents someone, a woman who is undeniably brilliant, living during a moment in history where it’s quite dangerous to be a brilliant woman openly. What we all kind of were going for was how would a brilliant woman both protect and empower herself in that time? That’s where a lot of the glamour comes in because she’s able to allow people to think what they want while keeping her private, fairly intense self, private."

The actress elaborated by saying that 'triggers' were the central theme of the film for her. She concluded, "Throughout the course of the movie, that inner life balloons, it gets triggered and it comes out with some pretty extreme results." Hathaway went so far as to have an out-of-body experience during the film's last sequence. She claimed, "I had a moment where in from within the scene, I left my body and observed it as an audience member and went, I have never seen this movie before. Like, this is something completely new."