Anne Hathaway said in a recent interview that she regrets posting a photo of her son to her Instagram account and letting the public into her private life.
“I might be inviting some criticism by mentioning this, but when have I ever not invited criticism?” she told Jezebel’s The Muse in an interview published on Monday, April 2. “When has any public figure ever not? But I had never posted a photo of my son, and I decided to post a shot of the back of his head, and almost as soon as I’d done it, I wished that I hadn’t. I felt like I had broken some kind of a seal in inviting people into my life. And even though I felt as though I had done it in as protective a way as I could, even though it was a moment I was incredibly proud of, I don’t know that I’ll ever do it again.”
The image that Hathaway is referencing was one that she shared in March, of her then-11-month-old son, Jonathan, watching her deliver a speech at the United Nations.
“JRS watching Mommy give her speech at the UN yesterday #forourboys #forourgirls #forthefuture #loveislove #parentsareparents #paidparental #iwd #ppl @unwomen,” the 34-year-old Colossal actress captioned the picture, in which only the top of her son’s head is visible, along with his sweet lion onesie.
“I’m a big believer that you gotta mess things up sometimes to really see them properly, so if I made a mistake or I messed up, I know how I feel about it much better now,” she told The Muse. “Instagram, when I first started, it was so much fun. And it was a great way to be silly and kind of do things off the cuff. And now, because of the time we live in, I think words and pictures are carrying a much greater weight. Or, much less depending on how you engage with it.”
In the interview, Hathaway also addressed that period of time in 2013 when the Internet seemed to be up in arms against her. (At the time, the Les Miserables star was accused of being “fake.”)
“It’s not that I’ve gotten a rhino skin to it, but I sort of see all of that for what it is,” she said. “How the world feels about me has nothing to do with me. How other people treat me has nothing to do with me. But if anything that anybody said resonated with me as something I’d like to work on for myself, I took it in like that. And to that extent, I feel like I got to shortcut a lot of my growth. To that extent, even though I wouldn’t have chosen to go through it, I still found a way to be grateful to it.”
