“She sent me a long email explaining to me what she was going through right then when she did this interview,” said journalist Kjersti Flaa
Anne Hathaway reached out with a “very personal note” to a reporter who recently resurfaced a 2012 interview described as “awful.”
On Oct. 5, Norwegian entertainment journalist Kjersti Flaa published a years-old, edited clip on YouTube from a junket interview she did with Hathaway during the Oscar winner’s press tour for Les Misérables.
Flaa called that interaction with Hathaway “top-notch cringe” and said she felt the star “hated me.” However, the journalist said Hathaway was “sweet” to her during a later interaction.
In a follow-up video uploaded Oct. 8, Flaa said she received an apologetic message from Hathaway via the actress’s publicist in response to coming across the 2012 interview.
“Yesterday I did receive an email. It was from Anne Hathaway’s publicist, and he forwarded a message to me from Anne Hathaway. I have to say, I was pretty shocked,” said Flaa in the video. “I had not expected her to reach out to me at all. I thought she was never gonna even see that video, but she did. And she did something pretty amazing.”
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“She sent me a long email explaining to me what she was going through right then when she did this interview, and she apologized for being… giving me an awful interview, basically. It was so touching to me,” continued the reporter. “Just talking about it makes me almost teary eyed, ’cause I was just so grateful that she did that.”
Flaa said it was a “very personal note” but wouldn’t reveal everything since “we decided that I wouldn’t share exactly what was in the email, but I just wanted to share with you guys what she did.”
Hathaway also invited Flaa to interview her for her next movie, out in May. “I’m really looking forward to that, Anne.”
In previous interviews, Hathaway has spoken about dealing with online negativity directed at her around the time of Les Misérables, including how the phrase “Hathahate” became a trend at the time.
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“How the world feels about me has nothing to do with me,” she told Jezebel back in 2017. “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.”
Flaa is the same reporter who resurfaced a 2016 video of Blake Lively that she called “the most uncomfortable interview situation I have ever experienced.” A source close to Lively told PEOPLE in August that the exchange was sparked by the journalist’s “rude statement” toward Lively.
