Everyone’s talking about how Tom Holland and Zendaya are having a great year, but let’s not forget that Anne Hathaway is making her mark on 2026.
The 43-year-old Oscar-winning actress has been one of the most bankable stars of the year, with roles in The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey, and has also starred in one of our favourite films of the year so far – the underseen Mother Mary.
She’s now on press tour duties for her latest role in David Robert Mitchell’s The End Of Oak Street, a sci-fi survival film produced by J.J. Abrams – and therefore rumoured to be a part of his Cloverfield anthology universe.
As if that wasn’t enough to celebrate, Hathaway is currently pregnant with her third child.
But because we can’t have nice things, the internet went and made it weird.
We say weird, we mean idiotic – proving once again that deeply missed author Umberto Eco was right when he said that the tragedy of the internet “is that it has promoted the village idiot to the level of bearer of truth”.
And a loud one at that.
Hathaway attended the world premiere of The End Of Oak Street at the Steven J. Ross Theater in Burbank in California, wearing a custom look by Atelier Prabal Gurung, consisting of low-rise jeans and a stylish crop top which showed off her baby bump.
As per usual, Hathaway looked radiant, but certain social media users decided it was time to disprove Darwinism by accusing the actress of not only looking “bizarre” and “tacky” but wearing a fake pregnancy belly.
Following a viral post on X (where else?) from an account titled “21”, commenters pointed out that there was something “off” with Hathaway’s stomach.
“Looks like a fake stomach. The belly button looks unreal,” one person commented. Another posted that it looked like “a prosthetic bump”, while one user chimed in by writing: “As someone who has kids, her belly looks like those fake ones they use in movies.”
Charming and not at all unwarranted.
The conspiracy theory went so viral that Hathaway was forced to respond, bringing classiness and humour to a pigsty.
She posted a video from the evening on Instagram and titled it: “Fake hair, real bump.”
Sadly – but somewhat predictably – that wasn’t the end of it.
As if it wasn’t distasteful enough to body shame and pass judgement on a pregnant woman’s body, some commentators started blaming Hathaway’s stylist for the apparently “unflattering wardrobe malfunction”.
“Unflattering styling for a beautiful pregnant woman,” one wannabe fashionista wrote, while another commented: “Pregnancy is beautiful, but this is a stylist fail.”
Now, to each their own when it comes to style and thoughts on low-rise jeans – but there are some crucial elements to take into consideration.
Firstly, why is this such a big deal?
Secondly, no two pregnancy bumps are identical. Grow up.
Thirdly, when you’re carrying the weight of a person inside you, you should be able to wear whatever makes you happy and comfortable without fear of either judgement or baseless theories accusing you of faking your pregnancy. Like Demi Moore posing for Annie Leibovitz on Vanity Fair in 1991 and Rihanna proudly revealing her pregnancy during the Super Bowl Halftime Show in 2023, Hathaway isn’t hiding her physical transformation and is choosing to celebrate it by not treating it as “unglamorous” or “weird”, as certain folk on social media choose to label it. Their reaction smacks of still engrained stigma when it comes to maternity and women’s changing bodies.
Then there’s the wider context to think about.
Anne Hathaway is married to actor Adam Shulman and before having her first two children in 2016 and 2019, she experienced a miscarriage in 2015. Worse, she suffered her miscarriage while starring in the one-woman play, Grounded, in which she had to act out childbirth every night.
Hathaway has been open about this and recently spoke to late night host Seth Meyers about how shocked she was to have got pregnant so easily given her age and after fertility challenges.
Announcing her second pregnancy in 2019, she also shared the challenges of conception: “For everyone going through infertility and conception hell, please know it was not a straight line to either of my pregnancies. Sending you extra love.”
While it might still be too much to ask for the chronically online to embrace body positivity for all, maybe they could redirect all that energy towards more meaningful matters. Or stop depriving that village of their idiot.
Anne Hathaway stars in The End of Oak Street, which is out this week. Stay tuned to Euronews Culture for our full review.