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Hugh Jackman Knew the Truth About Anne Hathaway

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Hollywood buried Anne Hathaway in mockery right as she was winning every award in sight — and Hugh Jackman refused to go along with it.

In early 2013, Anne Hathaway was doing something rare: sweeping an entire awards season. She’d won the Academy Award, the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the SAG Award for Best Supporting Actress, all for eight minutes of screen time as the doomed Fantine in Les Misérables. And somehow that same stretch became one of the loneliest periods of her career, as a wave of online mockery — nicknamed “Hathahate” — turned her acceptance speeches into a punchline. Her Les Misérables co-star Hugh Jackman, who had lived through the making of that film alongside her, wasn’t buying any of it.

• Hathaway and Jackman first shared a stage at the 81st Academy Awards in 2009, when he pulled her out of the audience during the opening number to sing “Frost/Nixon.”
• In 2012’s Les Misérables, Jackman played Jean Valjean opposite Hathaway’s Fantine, a role that earned her the 2013 Oscar, Golden Globe, BAFTA and SAG Award for Best Supporting Actress.
• Despite that sweep, Hathaway became the target of “Hathahate” — widespread online and media mockery of her acceptance speeches as overly rehearsed and inauthentic.

A Career Peak That Turned Toxic

Fantine wasn’t a role Hathaway phoned in. She famously cropped her hair on camera for the “I Dreamed a Dream” sequence and shed roughly 25 pounds to play a starving, dying mother selling everything she has, including her body, to save her daughter. Critics recognized it immediately — the performance became the film’s emotional center and the reason Les Misérables was in the awards conversation at all.

But somewhere between the Golden Globes in January and the Oscars in February 2013, the story around Hathaway curdled. Commentators picked apart her speeches word by word, accusing her of performing gratitude rather than feeling it. The pile-on spread fast enough that “Hathahate” became shorthand for a very specific kind of internet cruelty — one aimed less at her work and more at her personality, her tone, her face.

Jackman Had Already Seen the Real Version

What made Jackman’s perspective different is that he wasn’t reacting to speeches or interviews — he’d spent months on set with Hathaway during a notoriously grueling shoot. Director Tom Hooper had his cast sing live on camera rather than lip-sync to pre-recorded tracks, a demanding, physically exposing choice that left performers raw and unguarded take after take. Jackman watched Hathaway commit to that process fully, and he came away describing her dedication and vulnerability as genuine, not performed.

He knew the work behind Fantine wasn’t an act — because he’d been in the room for all of it.

That firsthand experience is why Jackman became one of the more visible defenders of Hathaway’s reputation during the backlash. He wasn’t speaking as a publicist or a co-star doing press-tour damage control; he was speaking as someone who had watched the effort up close, months before the internet decided her gratitude looked fake.

Solidarity When It Mattered Most

The larger point of the Goalcast story isn’t really about awards-season gossip — it’s about what it looks like when a colleague refuses to let a manufactured narrative stand unchallenged. Hathaway was winning nearly every trophy available to a supporting actress that year, and it still wasn’t enough to shield her from a hostile media cycle. Jackman’s public support didn’t erase the “Hathahate” moment, but it gave her one loud, credible voice saying the version of her being mocked wasn’t the version he knew.

Hathaway’s Fantine remains the performance people point to when they talk about her range, and the Oscar for it still sits as the peak of that particular awards run. What’s stuck around just as long is the memory of Jackman standing next to her through the ugliest part of winning it.