It turns out that Anne Hathaway doesn't actually like being called Anne...
Many Hollywood A-listers have names that they prefer their friends to use, and some have different names entirely.
This is largely due to unions such as SAG-AFTRA in the US and Equity in the UK having rules that no two people in the union can have the same name.
So if your name is John Smith, there's every chance that you're going to have to think of something else.
However, in the case of Hathaway, she actually just doesn't like her name.
During a 2021 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Hathaway set the record straight right away.
“Call me Annie,” she told Fallon. “Everybody. Everybody, call me Annie, please.”
Apparently, this isn’t just a casual nickname among close friends — Hathaway wants everyone to drop “Anne” for good. Fallon had asked if he could call her Annie, and her answer couldn’t have been more enthusiastic.
The Oscar-winning actress explained that her name drama goes all the way back to her teenage years when she joined the Screen Actors Guild.
“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 was like, ‘Well, it should be my name. My name's Anne Hathaway,’” she shared.
“So that seemed like the right choice, but it never occurred to me that for the rest of my life, people will call me Anne.”
And it turns out that being called Anne has a very specific emotional trigger for her.
“The only person who calls me Anne is my mother and she only does it when she's really mad at me, like really mad,” she said. “So, every time I step out in public and someone calls my name, I think they're going to yell at me.”
She joked: “People are like, ‘Anne!’ And I'm like, ‘What? What did I do?’”
Hathaway says even on movie sets, her co-stars and crew aren’t sure how to address her, often resorting to nicknames or creative workarounds.
“On sets, nobody is comfortable calling me Anne ever. It doesn't fit. I’m an Annie,” she explained. “And so people call me, like, ‘Miss H.’ People call me ‘Hath.’ So feel free, call me anything but Anne.”