Anne Hathaway: “I too have pretended certain things until I achieved them”

Javier Romualdo Los Angeles (USA), 23 Mar Anne Hathaway is the latest Hollywood star to join the wave of productions about impostors, scams and failed businesses with “WeCrashed”, an Apple TV+ series that reviews the financial scandals that surrounded the co-working office company WeWork. “It's not something new, they are stories as old as humanity, the only thing that has changed are the tools and that we are now starting to get to know the digital space”, the actress who won the Oscar in 2013 for “Les Misérables” analyzes in an interview with Efe. “WeCrashed” is the first television role for Hathaway to say goodbye to “Get Real” in 2000 and embarked on a career on the big screen that immortalized her name in films such as “The Devil Wears Prada” and “The Princess Diaries”. On her return to television, the actress plays one of the founders of WeWork, a popular company born in 2010, during the fever for co-working spaces (“coworking”), which was valued at around $50 billion, until it was discovered that it inflated its accounts and resembled a pyramid scam. Hathaway herself admits that she is interested in the idea behind the slogan “fake it till you make it” because in certain areas it comes to being respected. “I've done it myself. When I auditioned for 'Brokeback Mountain' I said I could ride a horse when I didn't know. I intended to learn, yes, but at that moment I lied,” he recalls about one of the roles that catapulted his name to the front line of cinema. According to his own example, if someone wants something and succeeds, “we don't question it”, but if it fails, it's when we don't hesitate to point the finger. What “WeCrashed” points to is one of the most surreal stories of US investment speculation. Based on the podcast “WeCrashed: The Rise and Fall of WeWork”, the series tells the story of Adam (Jared Leto) and Rebekah Neumann (Hathaway), who founded WeWork as a coworking space rental business. They reached 12,500 employees in 29 countries and diversified the business into housing, education and gyms. Its brand reached a global value of $47 billion in less than a decade and then collapsed just as it was going public, amid allegations of pyramid scam. “The series tells how the relationship between the two influenced the rise and fall of the company,” says Hathaway. It's quite complex.” While he was an ambitious businessman in New York, she was a yoga instructor and aspiring actress in Los Angeles who became a kind of “spiritual guide” for the company. “WeCrashed” comes to the heat of other productions that recount real frauds such as “The Dropout”, about the Silicon Valley company that promised to revolutionize medicine and that ended up with its director in court; “Inventing Anna”; or “The Tinder Swindler”. “We live in a time with great global access and things are taking on epic proportions,” the actress analyzes. The speculative bubbles, the crypto fever or the NFTs that make headlines day after day are the result of a world in which, Hathaway considers, “everything is growing much faster than in the past.” “People are trying to link capitalist practices with spiritual meaning and I'm not sure how that will go. I don't think it has much future,” he says. “WeCrashed” also serves as a social mirror of the corporate culture that succeeds in the United States and infects the rest of the world, agree its creators Lee Eisenberg & Drew Crevello. “It makes us wonder what it says about ourselves that someone like that could attract investors, millions of dollars and the dreams of hundreds of employees,” they say. CHIEF romu/ssa (photo) (video)