On Tuesday, Universal Pictures released the latest trailer for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey, which was immediately met with a deluge of different responses on social media.
Plenty of things have been said, and will continue to be said, about the anachronisms of certain modern words and the confusion about the cast’s American accents (completely ignoring the fact that accents would have been vastly different in the fictional era that the story is set). But a specific bit of flack has been thrown at Oscar-winning actress Anne Hathaway, who is set to play Penelope in the movie.
You don’t have to go far to find posts on social media reacting to one particular shot in the new trailer, where Penelope is passionately remarking to another character that “that world is gone.” Instead of talking about the moment itself, the majority of reactions are accusing Hathaway of having gotten “work done,” because her forehead does not appear to be wrinkled enough for the expression she’s making. The reactions have ranged from joking about the availability of Botox in Ancient Greece to calling the drug “like a disability for actors” to comparing Hathaway to younger actresses like Sydney Sweeney who don’t appear to have gotten plastic surgery done on their face yet.
Before we get into the Botox of it all, let’s acknowledge one larger problem: the Internet has developed a penchant for criticizing women’s faces for not looking conventional enough onscreen. We saw this with the release of the latest Supergirl trailer last month, as people criticized Milly Alcock’s version of Kara Zor-El for not mogging to the camera while trying to dodge a runaway motorcycle. So it almost felt inevitable that one of the women of The Odyssey would be met with a similar kind of reaction… but it’s especially complicated with Hathaway.
Has Anne Hathaway Gotten Botox?
The debate about Hathaway having gotten plastic surgery has been going on long before The Odyssey, as some criticized how her face looked while crying onscreen in the 2024 romantic comedy The Idea of You. Ever since then, there have been a number of posts of plastic surgeons trying to dissect her face and identify the procedures she might have gotten done, ranging from small injections of Botox to a full-blown facelift. Hathaway herself has never confirmed or denied any procedures… and honestly, she doesn’t need to.
It feels like an understatement to say that the entertainment industry’s relationship with plastic surgery has become like a snake eating its own tail. Women are expected to look as young as possible for as long as possible, but it would be taboo of them to acknowledge any of the work required to do that, unless a procedure produces drastic results that can’t be ignored, or when a celebrity later expresses regret for the procedure and tries to get it reversed. Hell, even as women have been turning towards Botox for purely medical benefits in recent years, the procedure has still been met with stigma.
When you couple that with a sense of subconscious ownership that people have over women’s bodies, it leads to people feeling like they’ve been betrayed by a celebrity who even slightly looks like they’ve gotten any work done. And when you couple that with the decades-long history that Hathaway has had in the entertainment industry, including the several years of backlash that inexplicably surrounded her 2012 Oscar win for Les Miserables, all of the jokes just get particularly frustrating.
(featured image: Universal Pictures)
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