“I just feel really bad for her”: Anne Hathaway Finds It Hard to Watch One of Her Most Sensational Performances Till Date

A stunning beauty who just never seems to age, Anne Hathaway is one of the best talents in the entire entertainment industry. Through fan-favorite masterpieces like The Princess Diaries film series (2001-04), The Devil Wears Prada (2006), and Les Misérables (2012), she has proven to be a versatile actress by effortlessly slipping into different moods as per what the role required of her.

But of all the roles she has portrayed to date, one in particular has struck her so hard that she even finds it “hard to watch.” Surprisingly enough, this role is actually the one that is regarded as one of Hathaway’s most sensational performances of her entire two-and-a-half-decade-old career to date: That of Fantine in her classic Oscar-winning musical masterpiece from 2012 with Hugh Jackman.

Anne Hathaway Claims She Feels “Really Bad” for Fantine

A masterpiece starring A-listers like Hugh Jackman, Russell Crowe, Amanda Seyfried, and even Eddie Redmayne among others besides Hathaway, Les Misérables was one of the best films from 2012 (if not the best), capturing the perfect essence of the unbound misery in life for the innocent.

But bringing all of those effects to life wasn’t an easy task. And even though Anne Hathaway herself embodied, perhaps, the most pitiful character in the entire film, i.e. Fantine, she still couldn’t help but express just how “bad” she felt for the poor miserably innocent soul.

During a recent interview with Vanity Fair, she expressed the same while talking about this particular movie and her character Fantine in it. Talking about her character, The Princess Diaries actress initially said:

I just feel really bad for her.

Because of the awful turn of events that lay ahead of her fan-favorite character in the movie, it is indeed understandable why Hathaway claims she feels “really bad” for her.

However, The Idea of You actress holds a different and much deeper perspective on feeling this way for Fantine — one that could, with deep contemplation, move even the hardest of hearts with ease.

Anne Hathaway Finds it “Hard to Watch” Fantine in Les Misérables

Continuing during the same interview, Hathaway then talked about the “Come to Me” scene in the Hugh Jackman-starrer where a heartbroken Fantine sings about meeting Cossette before collapsing onto her death bed one last time after finding out she hadn’t been rescued.

Sharing her own heart-wrenching interpretation of the song that she imagined and shared with her mother, The Devil Wears Prada Oscar-winning actress said:

You know, when you’re watching a match go out and you just hope it stays alight but it shrinks, and you just want it to hold on but it doesn’t? That’s what the song is for me. It’s the extinguishing of a flame, which is just so sad. So when I see that, I’m watching someone’s life, like, drain out of them, so it’s just, it’s hard to watch. 

While the Oscar-winning film is already enough to bring viewers to tears, this particular perspective further makes it all the more tear-jerking.

All of this being said, it becomes only understandable why Anne Hathaway finds it so thoroughly “hard to watch” the Russell Crowe-starrer movie and her respective character in it, considering how she was even brought to tears just talking about it.

You can watch Les Misérables on Netflix.