Anne Hathaway has recalled being asked a seriously creepy question by a journalist when she first started as an actor in her teens.
The Devil Wears Prada star spoke about the incident during a Q&A session following the premiere of her new movie, Eileen, at the Sundance Film Festival over the weekend.
“I just remembered one of the very first questions I ever got asked when I started acting and had to do press was: Are you a good girl or a bad girl?” Variety reports Anne as saying.
“I was 16. And my 16-year-old self wanted to respond with this film.”
Anne Hathaway attends the 2023 Sundance Film Festival Eileen Premiere at Eccles Center Theatre on January 21, 2023, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images)
The actor brought up the incident as she described wanting to work with Eileen director William Oldroyd after seeing the 2016 drama Lady Macbeth, which starred Florence Pugh as a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to an older man.
“I thought it was an extraordinary work,” she said.
“I saw a study of female complication that hit me really, really deep, and I felt like Will was a filmmaker that could be trusted to tell complicated stories, especially about females.”
Based on the 2015 novel of the same name by Otessa Moshfegh, Eileen follows a young woman living a grim life in Boston in the 1960s. While working at a prison, a woman named Rebecca (Hathaway) joins the staff and changes Eileen’s life.
Anne Hathaway attends the 2023 Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2023, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Bryan Steffy/GC Images)
Last year, Anne recalled another incident in early career that she’d rather forget, in which the people around her failed to tell her that one of her red carpet outfits was see-through.
“There was this one time where I was very young and dressed for an event, and I stepped onto a red carpet and did not know my dress was see-through, and I wasn’t wearing a bra,” she told Interview magazine.
“It was a very long carpet, and at no point did any of the people in that wall of photographers stop to give me a heads-up or offer me a jacket.”
She continued: “I’m not naive. I don’t expect that, but it’s something I would do for another person if I saw it. And so I would erase that, just because it sucked.”