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Ever since Anne Hathaway broke out as Mia Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries 20 years ago, we’ve been calling her "Anne" but, apparently, that’s not what the actress prefers. It is her real and actual name, but it’s a little too formal for the 38-year-old actress, who recently admitted that she dislikes the name everyone calls her by.
Just a couple days after Anne Hathaway asked everyone to please call her “Annie” or really just anything but her first name, the Madame Tussauds wax museum in Times Square, New York has already decided to listen up and change the plaque next to her own wax figure. Check it out the museum's recent Instagram post:
That’s some swift moving from the NYC museum! The exhibit that features tons of recreations of celebrities to scale in wax reopened back in August with capacity restrictions. The video shows an employee removing her “Anne Hathaway” nameplate with plans to replace it with “Annie” quite soon.
Hathaway discussed her dislike of being called Anne on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon while promoting HBO Max’s Locked Down. When the host asked her what he should call her, she spilled the tea on how she got stuck with a name she’s not fond of always being called. In her words:
When I was 14 years old, I did a commercial and I had to get my SAG card. And they asked me, ‘What do you want your name to be?’ And I’m like, well it should be my name, ‘My name is Anne Hathaway.’ So that seemed like the right choice, but it never occurred to me that for the rest of my life people would call me Anne. The only person who ever calls me Anne is my mother and she only does it when she’s really mad at me. Like, really mad. So every time I step out in public and someone calls my name, I think they’re going to yell at me.
Welp, she certainly remained tight-lipped about it until recently. She’s apparently been going by Annie, among other names, for years on sets of movies and among family and friends, but the public knows her best as Anne. The starlet continued with these words:
People are so lovely. They don’t want to be presumptuous so they come up with workarounds on set because the truth is nobody is comfortable calling me Anne ever. It doesn’t fit, I’m an Annie. So people call me Mrs. H, people call me Hath, so feel free, call me anything but Anne.
It’s nice to see that this little PSA is catching on and will perhaps fix a little issue she’s had around her career and public image for sometime. "Annie" is definitely a more approachable title, but one that not everyone would be sure is appropriate to call her as a stranger. It might take some time before Annie Hathaway is fully glued into our skulls instead of Anne, especially since she’ll seemingly continue to use it when being credited for her work. But hey, the more you know!
Annie Hathaway’s latest film is Locked Down, a movie she made under and about quarantine with Chiwetel Ejiofor that's directed by Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman. She also recently starred in The Witches with Octavia Spencer and Stanley Tucci. Both films are exclusively available to watch with an HBO Max subscription, which you can check out.
