Les Miserables type Movie genre Musical

Matt Lauer doesn’t mess around. When he greeted Anne Hathaway on the Today show this morning, the host got right down to business: “Good to see you,” he said. “Seen a lot of you lately.”

Lauer, of course, was referring to Hathaway’s major wardrobe malfunction at Monday’s Les Mis premiere. While exiting her car in a tight Tom Ford gown, the Oscar nominee accidentally flashed a crowd of photographers — who quickly noticed that Hathaway wasn’t wearing underwear.

The actress was clearly reluctant to discuss the mishap with Lauer. But after some prodding, she launched into an articulate response that skillfully turned the question on its head: “Well, it was obviously an unfortunate incident,” she began. “It kind of made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment and rather than delete it, and do the decent thing, sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants, which takes us back to Les Mis, because that’s what my character is.”

Boom! Did Hathaway miss her calling? She’d make a great PR flack, or maybe a high-powered lawyer.

After Hathaway’s rebuttal, Lauer stuck to a more traditional morning show script — asking her to discuss her role, joking that he’s sung “I Dreamed a Dream” a few times at karaoke. But when he lobbed a question about how Hathaway dropped 25 pounds to play the sickly, devastated Fantine, his guest dodged him again, explaining that she doesn’t want to glamorize her dramatic weight loss: “I didn’t do it to get hot, I did it to look like I was dying.” (Too bad she’s already spoken plenty about eating “two thin squares of dried oatmeal paste a day” while filming the movie.)

Moral of the story, kids: If you ask Anne Hathaway about something she’d rather not discuss, prepare to meet a brick wall. Also: Wear underpants.

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