At a time when people on the internet are mad at Elmo — yes, the red puppet from Sesame Street — for saying Asalamalaikum, actor Anne Hathaway just dropped another piece of essential Muslim vocabulary in an interview: Inshallah .
In a video posted by People magazine, the star talked about life in her 40s and said, “I want to live a long, healthy life, Inshallah, hopefully.”
Yeah, we did a double take while watching that clip and so did a bunch of people on X who thought they might have misheard something there.
Some people were sent and others were taken out by the invocation. One user even theorised that the actor’s pronunciation and placement meant Hathaway was someone who knew what the phrase meant and where to use it.
Inshallah wasn’t all she said in the interview.
In the sagely style of a person who lived their four decades on earth to the fullest, she said being 40 lets you look back at “how certain decisions bore fruit over time and so, you can kind of assess if you want to continue making those decisions, or if you want to make new ones”.
Hathaway said age had given her a better understanding of the phrase “take it with a grain of salt,” and she’d learnt to “really value the chill”.
She also said that in life “you can either fear aging, or you can fear dying young” and we really think someone needs to put that on a poster.
The actor said she embraces aging with “curiosity” and that some things don’t change as you get older, “You still never know what’s coming around the corner… and that’s true if you’re like 11 or you’re 43.”
