Anne Hathaway sent a personal email of apology to a journalist after a 12-year-old interview resurfaced in which she gave monosyllabic answers.
Kjersti Flaa, a Norwegian journalist who has built a career interviewing Hollywood stars, posted a YouTube video this week in which she reflected on the Les Misérables press junket.
Flaa came up with the idea of singing her questions in the hope that actors would respond with a tuneful answer. As the video shows, most played ball. Hathaway had other ideas.
The Princess Diaries actress declined to participate in the sing-song and proceeded to give brusque answers to Flaa’s questions. “Do you think love was more passionate back then?” Flaa asked. “No,” Hathaway replied shaking her head.
Flaa described the exchange as “topnotch cringe,” though she recognized that doing stunts during interviews can backfire. Flaa added that she had met Hathaway since the 2012 exchange and she had been “very sweet.”
Flaa’s clip of the Hathaway interview went viral on TikTok, where it was watched more than 10M times. It appears that Hathaway was among those who saw the video given she reached out to Flaa.
In a YouTube update, the journalist revealed that Hathaway’s publicist had forwarded her a personal email from the actress in which she apologized for their encounter 12 years ago.
“She sent me a long email explaining to me what she was going through right then and she apologized for giving me an awful interview,” Flaa said.
“It was so touching to me, just talking about it makes me almost teary-eyed. I was just so grateful that she did that. It was a very personal note.”
Flaa agreed not to share the contents of the email. In her original YouTube video, she reflected on the fact that Hathaway was getting abused on social media in the early 2010s. The so-called Hathahater movement sprung up after her awkward Oscars hosting gig alongside James Franco in 2011.
Flaa also revealed that when she originally posted the Les Misérables interview on her YouTube channel in 2012, she was told by a studio executive to take it down or risk being blacklisted.
Flaa also went viral in August after another of her old interviews resurfaced. This time, it was her encounter with Blake Lively, which Flaa described as “the most uncomfortable interview situation I have ever experienced.”
