There are so many Anne Hathaway memes, but fans recently found out which ones are the actress' favorites – and why one of them has been misinterpreted.
On Tuesday, Aug. 4, Hathaway spoke with fellow actor Ewan McGregor for Esquire's Inquiring Minds actor-on-actor interview series. McGregor asked Hathaway what her favorite meme of herself was, and she quickly brought up the cupcake meme and HR meme.
The cupcake meme centers on a series of paparazzi photos of the actress taken by Splash News in January 2016, when Hathaway was pregnant with her first child. She's reaching into a paper bag from a bakery as she walks, and the photos show a timeline of her enjoying a cupcake, reaching in for another and then frowning, presumably because there were no more
in the bag.
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But in this week's interview, Hathaway set the record straight. She bought the cupcake as a reward for doing cardio, and made the frowny face when she realized she was getting her picture taken.
The photos didn't go viral until October 2017, when Twitter user named @AHdoingthings posted them with the caption, "Anne Hathaway realizing she ate all the cupcakes." They took the situation out of its correct context, but Hathaway laughed it off in the interview and seemed to understand why people saw it a certain way: "The face I made was like, aw, no more cupcakes," she said in an exaggerated voice.
The tweet and different versions of it have been reposted across social media platforms in the following years, mostly centering on the same idea: "She's literally me," a common internet catchphrase.
In contrast, Hathaway's HR meme, which she mentions second in her Esquire interview, is not clearly positive. It stems from a screencap of her cameo in the reality TV show "RuPaul's Drag Race."
Hathaway joins the contestants over video call in one scene, likely because the Season 13 episode aired in early 2021 during the covid pandemic. In the screencap, Hathaway is seen smiling into her webcam. The ring light illuminating her face is reflected in her eyes. The image has become a placeholder in memes for an HR executive about to deliver bad news. It specifically captures that awkward, tragic moment of getting fired over a Zoom call – an experience all-too-familiar in the current remote work climate.
Hathaway said in the Esquire interview that when the image was taken, she was having a panic attack. "I started sweating, and my hair got really, really matted to my head, and I just smiled, and someone made me the forever face of HR."
Recently, meme creators put Hathaway's smiling HR face onto her character Queen Penelope from Christopher Nolan's "The Odyssey," showing that the meme still lives on in new forms.
Several Hollywood stars have spoken about their experiences on the other side of this memetic representation. Cillian Murphy's roles in "Oppenheimer" and the TV series "Peaky Blinders" have been memorized in positive memes, but he said in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY last year that he "tries very hard" to avoid them.
Meanwhile, singer Demi Lovato dressed up as one of her viral memes, Poot, last Halloween. She told Harper's Bazaar in 2023 that she originally thought the meme was "definitely weird" but "it's really funny to look back on."
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Anne Hathaway sets the record straight about her cupcake meme
