Anne Hathaway called abortion an “act of mercy,” and now Christian and conservative audiences want to boycott her new film.
The comment came during a 2022 appearance on ABC’s “The View,” recorded months after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The landmark 1973 ruling had stood for nearly fifty years before the Dobbs decision, backed by six Republican-appointed justices, returned the issue of abortion law to individual states.
Hathaway was seated with the show’s cast when she offered the characterization, describing a procedure that opponents consider morally indefensible using language that drew sharp backlash from religious and conservative viewers.
According to a report, the fallout has now reached Hathaway’s latest film, a long-awaited sequel to the 1990s racing drama “Days of Thunder.” The movie co-stars Tom Cruise, an actor who has historically appealed to the same conservative audiences now calling for the boycott.
That dynamic puts the project in an awkward spot. Cruise has cultivated goodwill among audiences that Hathaway’s comments have directly alienated, and the two stars now share top billing on a film caught in the middle of that divide.
The Dobbs ruling, which shocked much of the country when it landed, effectively ended the federal constitutional framework around abortion that had been in place since 1973. The decision leaned heavily on the court’s Republican-appointed majority to argue that no such right existed in the Constitution, shifting regulatory power back to state legislatures.
Hathaway’s phrasing, calling her pro-choice position an act of mercy, struck many critics as a deliberate reframing of a practice they view as the taking of a human life. For those audiences, the language did not soften the issue. It sharpened the offense.
Whether the boycott gains enough traction to affect the film’s box office remains to be seen, but the controversy has drawn renewed attention to both the actress and the movie ahead of its release. For Cruise, whose career has seen a massive resurgence in recent years, the timing is complicated. His co-star’s political comments have become part of the conversation surrounding a project he is presumably counting on to perform well.
The intersection of Hollywood politics and ticket sales is nothing new, but the post-Dobbs climate has made abortion commentary from public figures particularly combustible. Hathaway stepped directly into that environment, and the reaction has been swift.
