Speaking to People in 2019, Anne herself said: “Can I dish some tea? I turned that gig down, and James is the one that convinced me to do it.”
Reflecting on how badly the night ended up going, the star added: “When all the dust settled, I was just like: ‘You gotta be kidding me.’ Your first instinct is usually the right one… All the reasons why I turned it down came true.”
And James echoed this sentiment in a 2016 interview with New York Magazine, where he said: “When Anne Hathaway decided to host the Oscars with me… She had said no before, and then they asked me to ask her, and I said: ‘Let’s just do it. It’ll be an adventure,’ and then we got a lot of shit for it. I probably got more than she did, but she got a lot.”
He went on to downplay the negative response, insisting: “I’m going to do what they ask me to and do it as well as I can, but I don’t need this to be the best Oscars ever. I’m not getting anything out of that. In the best-case scenario, even if I killed it, it’s not going to help my career, because that’s not what it’s based on. It was an experiment.”
